Opus Doloris. Polyphony.
This poetry holds the unshakable note of memory with a tuning fork.
This music emerges from the debris of pain.
This love testifies. It endures.
In April 2024, as part of the Reporting from the Future project, Ukrainian authors, journalists, and artists visited Bosnia and Herzegovina at the invitation of the WARM Foundation. The participants explored the similarities and differences, parallels and patterns of the wars in the former Yugoslavia compared to the current war in Ukraine. Based on this experience, how can we comprehend the painful consequences of a prolonged war for society and the country as a whole?
Due to Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine, it is not easy to preserve and update book collections: since February 24, 2022, the Russian occupants have destroyed or damaged more than 700 Ukrainian libraries. By the end of 2024, libraries in all regions of Ukraine will receive 40,000 books from British publishers as part of a joint initiative of PEN Ukraine, Book Aid International, English PEN, PEN International, and Humanitarian Nova Poshta. The event will feature a presentation of the Unbreakable Libraries initiative, and guest library directors will tell more about their work during the war.
Russia’s war against Ukraine is the best-documented war in the history of the world. The book Dialogues on War is an archive record of how opinions about Ukraine and its power have been changing during the first year of the full-scale invasion. The thoughts and positions of intellectuals from all over the world, the gradual justification of their agency, the creation of an international language “about us and the war” and the process of gaining agency with each subsequent answer about Ukraine and Ukrainian without the prism of the occupier’s imperial gaze. How do we talk to the world about Ukrainian in our own terminology, within the framework of our history?
Ukrainian Fatigue is a two-voiced music and poetry performance that will be premiered at the Book Arsenal Festival. The singing and music by Mariana Sadovska and poetry by Kateryna Kalytko weave together a story of memory – private, family, and collective, as well as a connection to the land, love, pain, and persistence. This is a narrative about the unbearable weight of the time we live together, but also an irony outwards, to a bigger world that can allow itself to become tired of complex Ukrainian issues. But most of all, it is a story about the power to keep going, to grow truth out of grief. “Because when you defend yourself, there is no fatigue for you.”
The event will feature works by young authors who took part in the 2nd Propysy Workshop Festival organized by PEN Ukraine as a space for learning, self-presentation, and joint creativity of Ukrainian debut writers. Some names will be completely new to the literary audience. The festival almanac will be presented, which is the result of the second edition of Propysy and a hallmark of a new cohort of personalities who, hopefully, will shape the future of Ukrainian literature.
