Author Talk: Olena Stiazhkina on "Ukraine, War, Love - A Donetsk Diary"

Join Tomorrow Bookstore for an author conversation with Olena Stiazhkina with translator Anne O. Fisher on day to day developments in and around her beloved hometown during Russia's 2014 invasion and occupation of the Ukrainian city of Donetsk.

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Olena Stiazhkina will be in conversation with translator Annie O. Fisher about Stiazhkina's new book, Ukraine, War, Love: A Donetsk Diary (translated by Anne O. Fisher).

About Ukraine, War, Love: Stiazhkina’s diary opens on March 2, 2014, as the first wave of pro-Russian protest washes over eastern Ukraine in the wake of Euromaidan, the Revolution of Dignity, and closes on August 18, 2014, the day a convoy of civilian Ukrainian refugees is deliberately slaughtered by Russian forces. Vignettes from her personal life intermingle with current events as Stiazhkina examines ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. She is captured early on by pro-Russian forces while browsing for books, but freed when one of her captors turns out to be a former student. We walk with local dogs and their owners; we meet a formidable apartment building manager who shames occupiers into letting her dismantle and remove their artillery from the roof of her building; we follow a family evacuated to Kyiv whose young son builds checkpoints out of Legos. Stiazhkina documents it all, guiding us with sly humor, dry wit, and dripping sarcasm as we descend with her into grim war. Olena Stiazhkina’s Ukraine, War, Love: A Donetsk Diary is a fierce love letter to her country, her city, and her people.

About Olena Stiazhkina: Olena Stiazhkina is from Donetsk, Ukraine. A historian by training with dozens of scholarly articles to her name, she taught Slavic history at Donetsk National University for over twenty years until Russia began another bloody chapter of that history with its 2014 invasion of Ukraine. Stiazhkina is also a writer who has published eleven books of fiction, from novels and short story collections to detective novels (the latter under the pen name Olena Iurska). Her historian’s background and writer’s acumen combine in a body of creative work that is gripping, sharply observed, and tender—yet hilarious, and furious, too. Stiazhkina has received numerous awards for her fiction over the years, most recently the 2023 Lviv UNESCO City of Literature Award for her novel Cecil the Lion Had to Die, a bilingual novel in Russian and Ukrainian. (translated by Dominique Hoffman) and (translated by Anne O. Fisher) are now available in English from the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

About Anne O. Fisher: Translator Anne O. Fisher condemns the Russian Federation’s ongoing war of aggression on Ukraine. Her most recent translation is Ukraine, Love, War: A Donetsk Diary by Ukrainian writer, journalist, and historian Olena Stiazhkina (Harvard UP, 2024). Fisher and her husband Derek Mong are the incoming co-editors of the literary journal At Length. Read more at www.anneofisher.com/.

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