If your idea of a literary festival involves gentle rain in Hay-on-Wye, twee bookshops in Edinburgh, or a pleasant stroll through a convention centre in Washington DC, then the Kyiv Book Arsenal might make you feel like you’ve fallen through a wormhole into an alternate dimension - one where the air-raid siren is the opening act and soldiers run the best coffee stand.
The crowd, remarkably young and dressed to impress, clutched bags of books and hugged friends as they promenaded through the 18th-century military arsenal that serves as the venue. Everyone insisted this year was quieter than previous editions - partly because Kyiv had apparently swapped its usual spring heat for Hay-on-Wye’s signature drizzle, and partly because Russia had spent the previous week launching 60 missiles and 600 drones at the capital, with warnings of more to come.
And come they did - on Monday night, after the festival ended, a rain of ballistic missiles and Shahed drones hit the city. But on Friday, the evacuation alarms went off several times, forcing Deputy Minister of Culture Bohdana Laiuk to compete with an air-raid alert while awarding the prize for best foreign translation of a Ukrainian book. The winner? Nina Murray, for her English version of Lesia Ukrainka’s early-20th-century feminist verse drama, Cassandra. Nothing says “literary prizegiving” like a backdrop of potential annihilation.
The military presence was everywhere. The 8th Air Assault Force ran arguably the best coffee stand in a coffee-obsessed nation, handing out bookmarks with the slogan “If you love reading, we like you” and a link to donate. The army’s cultural forces set up an ammo box for donated books to be sent to the frontline: offerings included Ukrainian translations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, alongside a volume by contemporary poet Halyna Kruk and a frontline memoir, Please Don’t Be Afraid, by Pavlo “Pashtet” Belyanskiy.
A sign of the nation’s complete engulfment by war was the sight of so many soldiers on stage - writers who became soldiers, soldiers who became writers. The Russia-Ukraine war has dragged on so grievously that entire publishing cycles have turned since 2022. Early in the full-scale invasion, poetry emerged as the form that could most swiftly capture the explosion of time and meaning wrought by war. But now, after four years, soldiers have had time to craft finely tuned frontline memoirs.
“I’m seeing more and more books describing the experience of those who have joined the army, reflecting a change of status from civil to military and how it has impacted their sense of selves,” said festival programmer Maksym Butkevych, a human rights defender who volunteered for the army in 2022 and was captured, tortured, and held prisoner for two years. He suggested this year’s tagline, “bear your freedom” - a nod to the burden of responsibility that comes with liberty. “Reading is a symbol of freedom - something that during most of my time in captivity I was forbidden from doing. It is the place where you have an inner world that cannot be invaded by the captors,” he said.
A balance between freedom, frankness, and responsibility was the subject of an onstage discussion between soldier-memoirists, including Artur Dron’, a young writer and poet whose new volume of essays, Hemingway Knows Nothing, has become a bestseller. In a context where writing is not subject to government censorship, the writers debated whether they had a duty to impose self-censorship for the common good. “It’s not about forbidding yourself something,” said Dron’, “but about feeling responsible for what you do.”
In another session, titled Fragility of the Hero, Dron’ and others dismantled the old Soviet image of the soldier as an inhumanly perfect being. That hyperbolic rhetoric, Dron’ argued, risked allowing citizens to outsource individual responsibility onto supposedly flawless “heroes.” “If we put the military on a pedestal,” added Butkevych, “we deprive them of the right to be ordinary, imperfect human beings.”
Time has also birthed new literary approaches. From the clipped, documentary writing of the early years, new forms are emerging, such as Katya Iakovlenko’s poetic book-length essay Donbas as a Metaphor, newly out in Ukrainian from ist publishing. Sasha Dovzhyk, director of the Institute for Documentation and Exchange (Index), pointed to work by Anna Gruver, whose hybrid of “diary, essay and poetic writing” was “breaking free of expectations of what ‘war writing’ should be. Writers are ready to experiment.”
Not everything was directly focused on the war. There were huge queues for Ilarion Pavliuk’s fat mystery novels (one air-defence volunteer was carrying two to be signed, along with children’s books for his grandchildren in the US). National treasure Oksana Zabuzhko discussed the 30th anniversary of her novel Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex, a feminist succès de scandale from 1996 that trailblazed Ukrainian-language publishing. The Osnovy publishing house was promoting titles including the first Ukrainian translation of EM Forster’s A Room With a View. There were slam poetry championships, collage workshops, soft play for kids, a calligraphy studio, and a quiet room for sensory overload.
But the war pervaded everything. Publishers spoke of rising material costs exacerbated by the exchange rate against the euro, the necessary but costly use of generators in printing factories, floods damaging stock when heating systems exploded after the winter freeze, and delayed print runs. All of it meant books were more expensive for buyers. “Two years ago people were buying two or three books without hesitation,” one publisher said. “Now it’s a question of, this one, or this one?”
It was hard to imagine a book festival with higher stakes. The boom in Ukrainian publishing that began three years ago was the direct result of a shift in consciousness - a move away from the Russian language and literature many had grown up with. As Bohdana Laiuk said in 2023: “People began to understand that the Russians came here to kill people simply because they were Ukrainian. So people are asking: what does it actually mean to be Ukrainian? Literary culture gives us the place to understand who we are.”
“Kyiv Book Arsenal is more than a book festival, it’s a laboratory for exchanging ideas,” said Butkevych. “It’s about discussing our values and what we share as a community. Everything is intertwined: the Ukrainian language, book buying, discussing ideas - these are the threads that knit our community together.”