10 Essential Ukrainian Reads, From Memoir to Novel

Dr. Sasha Dovzhyk is a Ukrainian writer, journalist and founder of Index: Institute for Documentation and Exchange. Her latest book Apocalypse Baroque: Tales from Ukraine at War will be published in the UK September 24th. She recently participated in Lviv Book Forum, September 11 to 13, in digital partnership with Hay Festival Global.

In its fifth year of partnership with Hay Festival Global, Lviv BookForum 2026 brought together writers from across the globe for three days of hybrid conversations exploring memory, displacement, grief and the enduring power of literature. Events from Lviv Book Forum are available to watch free from anywhere in the world on Hay Festival Anytime—sign up here.

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This list below, of books written by Ukrainians in English or translated from Ukrainian into English, sheds light on what has long been overshadowed by empires seeking Ukraine’s erasure: the country’s rich literary tradition and its tradition of resistance. I have compiled this list when Russia targeted Ukrainian publishing infrastructure with missiles and destroyed more than 13 million books in a month—a third of the country’s annual print run. In this light, it is time to consider carefully why Ukrainian letters pose such a threat to the Russian regime.

From books by canonical Ukrainian authors silenced by the Russian empire to works by contemporary writers who have enlisted in the armed forces, these texts are a guide to the country’s past and present, its literary experiments and diverse cultural geographies. They range across genre and register—fin-de-siècle feminist mythmaking and poetry written in frontline trenches, testimony assembled from a war crimes investigator’s unfinished manuscript and postmodern fiction that watches an empire disintegrate from within. Reading these books is a form of restoring justice for a nation which has so long fought for the right to narrate its stories on its own terms.

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Lesia Ukrainka, Cassandra (HURI Books, 2024), translated by Nina Murray

Lesia Ukrainka is a turn-of-the-century writer who tackled key themes of western canon from a feminist and anti-colonial perspective. Her choice to write in the Ukrainian language, persecuted by the Russian empire, and to speak for her nation when it was stateless has for decades denied Ukrainka representation in the world republic of letters. Nina Murray’s fresh translation of her poetic drama Cassandra helps us review the myth of Trojan war today—from the perspective of a woman who was cursed to know the truth but never to be believed.

Victoria Amelina, Looking at Women Looking at War (Harper Collins, 2025)

A novelist turned war crimes researcher, Victoria Amelina travelled her war-torn country photographing bomb craters in children’s playgrounds and recording survivors’ testimonies, standing alongside the women she called her sisters: lawyers, soldiers, journalists, museum workers fighting for justice. She did not survive to finish her telling of their stories—killed by a Russian missile strike in 2023, two-thirds through the manuscript of Looking at Women Looking at War. Assembled by her close friends and family, the book’s forced silences and empty pages become its own form of testimony: a verdict for Amelina’s killers, and eternity for her voice. The book received the George Orwell Prize for Political Writing and the Moore Prize for Human Rights Writing.

Maik Yohansen, Dr. Leonardo’s Journey to Sloboda Switzerland with His Future Lover, the Beautiful Alcesta, translated by Uilleam Blacker (HURI Books, 2026)

Maik Yohansen belongs to Ukraine’s so-called Executed Renaissance, the generation of culture makers purged in the early 1930s by the Soviet regime. In 1937, he was arrested and executed by the authorities alongside thousands of Ukrainian intellectuals. In his playful modernist novel about an Italian doctor and his “future lover” traveling through northeastern Ukraine, the landscape is the true protagonist while human characters are treated as modernist puppets. This “landscape novel” reads poignantly today when the lands it explores are daily mined, polluted with explosives and mutilated by Russia’s military aggression.

Olena Stiazhkina, Cecil the Lion Had to Die (HURI Books, 2024), translated by Dominique Hoffman

In 2014, Olena Stiazhkina, a writer and professor of history at the Donetsk National University, was forced to flee her city under Russian occupation. Donetsk is a focal point of her literary work and activism, for which she was awarded the Vasyl Stus Prize in 2026. Stiazhkina’s east contains multitudes: her writing challenges the stereotypical (post-)Soviet image of the region as a lump of coal, a monochrome territory populated by lumpen proletariat. The author evokes its complex multi-ethnic history which, among others, had accommodated Greeks from Crimea and German settlers, attracted Belgian and Welsh capitalists, long before it became a flagship industrial site of the Soviet Union, which again entailed mass displacements and reshuffling of the population. Her Cecil the Lion Had to Die is a novel about the war, about eastern Ukraine, and about history. It alternates between Russian and Ukrainian, reflecting the linguistic flexibility of eastern Ukrainian society—that is nevertheless politically charged.

Kateryna Zarembo, Ukrainian Sunrise: Stories of the Donetsk and Luhansk Regions from the Early 2000s, trans. Tetiana Savchynska (ASP, 2024)

Kateryna Zarembo’s book is a nonfiction companion to Olena Stiazhkina’s novels. Zarembo too explores perhaps the most mythologised and demonised region in Ukraine, tracing how Soviet power sought to erase the Ukrainian and European past of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Against this engineered blank slate, Zarembo recovers the patriotic communities and writers, as well as football ultras who kept Ukrainian identity alive in the east of the country from the early 2000s to 2014. A mother of four, a PhD in Political Science, Zarembo finished the book, then joined the volunteer Hospitallers battalion as a combat medic, then enlisted in the Armed Forces—one more Ukrainian intellectual who chose to defend the country with arms not words.

Yuri Andrukhovych, The Moscoviad, trans. Vitaly Chernetsky

Originally written in 1993, The Moscoviad offers a view of Moscow from a colonised subject rather than the usual Russian lens or fascinated outsider’s gaze. The novel is set in 1991 and begins inside the literary dormitory of Moscow State University. It follows a Ukrainian poet haunted by KGB officers as the empire disintegrates around him—a collapse enacted at every level: in the plot, in the novel’s fragmented form, and in language itself, as Ukrainian, Russian, German, and obscenity intermingle. Postmodern, postcolonial, and darkly humorous, it captures the Soviet Union’s last gasp from the vantage of one of the peoples it had colonised.

Serhiy Zhadan, Voroshilovgrad (Deep Vellum, 2016), translated by Isaac Wheeler and Reilly Costigan-Humes 

Serhiy Zhadan’s Voroshilovgrad (2010) is set in a city that no longer exists—renamed four times in the twentieth century, yet alive in the intimate memories of its characters. The novel’s hero Herman, an uprooted loser of the post-Soviet generation, is forced home to piece together a minefield of traumatic memory and take responsibility for his land and community. Though written years before the war, the novel reads as prophetic: it brims with violence, military outfits, and men defending their territory against invaders. Immersed in the myths and light of the eastern steppe, it marks the shift of Ukraine’s centre of gravity eastward, crystallising a new identity on the frontier. Since 2014, Luhansk/Voroshilovgrad has been occupied by Russia.

Artem Chapeye, Ordinary People Don’t Carry Machine Guns, trans. Zenia Tompkins 

Artem Chapeye, a self-described pacifist and prominent male feminist, enlisted the day after 24 February 2022. Ordinary People Don’t Carry Machine Guns is his memoir and document of the first three years of Russia’s full-scale invasion. Throughout, Russia and the fear, grief, and guilt it brings is named simply “gloom,” encompassing both the army and the psychological toll it inflicts. Chapeye’s inquiry doesn’t shy away from the contradictions experienced by a progressive left-wing intellectual forced to defend his society and values with arms.

Artur Dron, We Were Here (Jantar, 2024), translated by Yuliya Musakovska

Ukrainian literature has a powerful poetic tradition. One of the reasons is that short form, including poetry, is less dependent on cultural infrastructure and material conditions: unlike a novel, a poem can be written in a trench, in a labour camp, or memorised and passed in whispers between the communities of resistance to the imperial power. The collection We Were Here was written largely on the frontline, where the twenty-four-year-old poet Artur Dron has served since 2022. Illustrated with children’s drawings sent to soldiers—which, Dron writes, gave him and his fellow fighters the strength to keep going—the collection asks why poetry matters in wartime, when it can protect no one and bring no one back. Its answer is the book itself: masterfully translated into English by the bilingual poet Yuliya Musakovska, it testifies, as one poem puts it, that Ukrainian literature ‘now contains more’ of the silence between words than the words.

Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (2021)

This book by perhaps the most prominent and prolific historian of Ukraine is an essential, intellectually engaging and elegantly written guide through Ukraine’s complex past and its position at the crossroads of history. Situated between Central Europe, Russia, and the Black Sea, Ukraine has repeatedly served as the strategic gateway empires fought to control—Roman and Ottoman, Third Reich and Soviet. Plokhy tells its history through the figures who tried to claim or resist it, from Vikings and Cossacks to the architects of modern Ukrainian national identity.

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Dr Sasha Dovzhyk is a Ukrainian writer, journalist and founder of Index: Institute for Documentation and Exchange. Her latest book ‘Apocalypse Baroque: Tales from Ukraine at War’ will be published in UK on 24 September 2026. She recently participated in Lviv Book Forum, 11-13 September 2026, in digital partnership with Hay Festival Global.

In its fifth year of partnership with Hay Festival Global, Lviv BookForum 2026 brought together writers from across the globe for three days of hybrid conversations exploring memory, displacement, grief and the enduring power of literature. Events from Lviv Book Forum are available to watch free from anywhere in the world on Hay Festival Anytime – sign up here.