Writing Through War: In Conversation with Myroslav Laiuk on Bakhmut

Bakhmut, formerly a quiet provincial city, is now a global headline. In his book Bakhmut, Myroslav Laiuk captures the most intense battles of 2023 through honest storytelling and powerful photography. He spent those days with soldiers, medics, and civilians, witnessing life where it seemed impossible to exist. Join us for an evening with the author to discuss what it means to write through war, to reflect on the challenges of representing violence and suffering, and to consider the writer’s responsibility in times of crisis. The conversation will also explore broader questions about how memory is shaped in real time, and how language can both record and resist destruction.

Myroslav Laiuk is a Ukrainian writer and war reporter. He holds a PhD and taught creative writing at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy before the onset of the full-scale war. Prior to 2022, he also authored three poetry collections and three novels. Now, as a frontline war documentarian, he has published two books of wartime reportage – Bakhmut (2023) and Lists (2025). Bakhmut received the George Shevelov Prize (2024) and was shortlisted for the BBC Ukraine Book of the Year Award (2024) and Canada’s Peterson Literary Prize (2024). His work has appeared in The Dial, Eurozine, LitHub, Los Angeles Review of Books, and New Statesman.

In conversation with

Iryna Odrekhivska is a Lecturer in Ukrainian and East European Culture at UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies. Her research and teaching focus on discourses of empire and cultural identity in East Central Europe, literature and memory, translation history, translingual writing and wartime environmental writing. Forthcoming volumes include Translation as Resistance: Czech and Ukrainian Historical Perspectives (University of Chicago Press, March 2026) and Translation Studies before ‘Translation Studies’ (UCL Press, January 2026). She is co-editor of the award-winning Translation in Ukraine (24 August 1991 – 24 February 2022) (Lviv University Press, 2025).