Ukraine Writes Back: The War We Speak, the Words We Choose
“Ukraine Writes Back: Writers, Poets and the War” is a series of four webinars co-hosted by the Research Initiative on Post-Soviet Space (RIPSS) at The University of Melbourne and the Ukrainian Studies Association of Australia and New Zealand (USAANZ).
The fourth webinar in the series “The War We Speak, the Words We Choose” brings together in conversation Oleksandr Mykhed and Eugenia Kuznetsova.
Registration via link: https://unimelb.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_phGo__DESUaFVMNEIkkVbQ
Writers Oleksandr Mykhed and Eugenia Kuznetsova will speak with Olga Maxwell about making sense of everyday living amidst loss, displacement, erased childhoods and crushed memories of the life ‘before’. And yet in the middle of so much trauma, children are born, couples get married, trees grow, and books continue to be written. Oleksandr and Eugenia will read from their prose and reflect on the place of language, politics and history in the fate of Ukrainian families across generations.
Friday 3 October 2025, 5:00 pm AEST Melbourne
Friday 3 October 2025, 10:00 am Kyiv
Friday 3 October 2025, 8:00 am London
“Eat, kill, grief, repeat.”
Oleksandr Mykhed is a writer. Until March 2022, he lived in Kyiv; he is now enlisted in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. He is the author of 10 books; selected essays and excerpts from his books have been translated into ten languages. He has participated in literary residencies in Finland, Latvia, Iceland, the USA and France, and a virtual residency at Oxford University. He has written for publications including The Financial Times, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and The Guardian, and has appeared as a guest on CNN and NPR. He is a member of PEN Ukraine.
Eugenia Kuznetsova is a Ukrainian novelist, translator and researcher. Her works explore themes of family and society. Her debut novel got a special mention from the European Union Prize for Literature, while her second novel received a BBC book of the year prize. She holds a PhD in International and Intercultural Studies from the University of Deusto in Spain. Kuznetsova has also authored a popular science book on language in Soviet times.
Olga Maxwell is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Languages and Linguistics at the University of Melbourne. Her research expertise includes bilingualism, sociolinguistics, English as second language, prosody across languages, and varieties of English in multilingual contexts, with a particular focus on language contact, mobility and migration. One of her current research projects centres on the linguistic repertoires and multilingual practices among war-displaced Ukrainians in Australia, exploring language, trauma and identity.