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 .

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.

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.