Many more than the recorded 110 writers and artists have been killed by Russian forces in Ukraine. Russia’s hybrid war targets Ukrainian language and culture, destroying libraries and printing houses, literally burning books and those who make them.

Now silenced voices bear posthumous testimony to the inspiring yet tragically vulnerable spirit of Ukrainian resistance: Volodymyr Vakulenko, executed by Russian forces in 2022 and thrown into a mass grave, the novelist turned poet and war crimes investigator, Victoria Amelina, killed in July 2023 after a missile struck the pizza restaurant where she was dining, and the soldier-poet Maksym Kryvtsov, struck down in January 2024 only a short time after the publication of his collection, Verses from the Trench.

Join the prize-winning Ukrainian poets Yuliya Musakovska and Olena Huseinova as well as Hanna Khriakova, international manager of the Lviv UNESCO City of Literature, as they carry the voices of their lost friends and comrades and share those who are defending Ukraine now, as soldier-poets on the front line, or as writers and artists on the home front and on the international stage, doing all they can to preserve a people and culture faced with a brute force that seeks only to destroy.

In conversation with Hugh Roberts and Helen Vassallo from Languages, Cultures and Visual Studies, University of Exeter.

Proceeds will go to Hospitallers, a Ukrainian voluntary paramedic organization working to save lives on the front line. See https://www.hospitallers.org.uk/

This event is an external hire

VENUE: EXETER PHOENIX, WORKSHOP

*Subject to a £1.50 ticketing system charge. We don’t charge this to make a profit. Find out more >>