We should look at wars not to build hierarchies but to understand something important about humans. Where does the violence come from? How to prevent it? What to do when it is already there? How can we defend ourselves and others?

For this episode, we invited an award-winning writer V.V. Ganeshananthan. Her novel "Brotherless Night" tells a story of the civil war in Sri Lanka that has lasted for more than 25 years. The book won Women’s Prize for Fiction 2024 and the Asian Prize for Fiction in 2023. In this conversation we tried to connect war experiences in Sri Lanka and Ukraine.

Host: Volodymyr Yermolenko, a Ukrainian philosopher and journalist, the chief editor of UkraineWorld and the president of PEN Ukraine.

Explaining Ukraine is a podcast by UkraineWorld, a media about Ukraine run by Internews Ukraine, and based in Kyiv.

You can support our work at https://www.patreon.com/c/ukraineworld. Your support is crucial as our media increasingly relies on crowdfunding.

You can also support our volunteer trips to the front-line areas, where we provide assistance to both soldiers and civilians - mainly by bringing cars for soldiers and books for civilians. You can support our trips via PayPal at [email protected].

This episode was produced in partnership with the Ukrainian Institute, Ukraine's major cultural and public diplomacy institution, and NGO Cultural Diplomacy Foundation.

"Brotherless Night": https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/453754/brotherless-night-by-ganeshananthan-v-v/9780241997673