Can our stories help us build a better world? As global wars rage around us, a trio of award-winning writers join Ukrainian Institute London director Olesya Khromeychuk to explore the role of culture, identity and belonging in understanding history and shaping the future. Drawing on their latest work, Ukrainian writer Tanja Maljartschuk, British-Turkish novelist Elif Shafak, and American-British-Libyan author Hisham Matar, share stories of redrawn borders, displaced peoples and broken identities to offer lessons for the future from the shatter zones of empires.

Join us at The Conduit as we welcome old friends and new faces to our stage for this timely conversation. This event is part of Lviv BookForum 2025, run in partnership with Hay Festival Global and the Ukrainian Institute London.

Event Schedule

6:30pm: Doors open, Pre event socialising and networking

A cash bar will be available for refreshments. 

7:00pm: Event begins

8:00pm: Event ends

Post event book signing, socialising and networking

Speakers:

Tanja Maljartschuk is a Ukrainian writer and essayist based in Vienna. She has published several short story collections and novels, including A Biography of a Chance Miracle and Forgottenness (widely translated), the children’s book Mox Nox, and the German-language essay collection Gleich geht die Geschichte weiter, wir atmen nur aus. She has received several awards, among them the BBC Book of the Year (Ukraine, 2016), the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize (2018) and the Usedom Literature Prize (2022). The English edition of Forgottenness was shortlisted for the EBRD Prize in 2025.

Hisham Matar was born in New York to Libyan parents, spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo and has lived most of his life in London. His memoir The Return received a Pulitzer Prize in 2017. He is also the author of In the Country of Men, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Anatomy of a Disappearance and A Month in Siena. His most recent novel, My Friends, won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2024, was longlisted for the Booker Prize, and nominated for the National Book Award. His work has been translated into over 30 languages.

Elif Shafak is an award-winning British Turkish novelist, whose work has been translated into 58 languages. The author of 20 books, 13 of which are novels, she is a bestselling author in many countries around the world. Shafak’s novel 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the RSL Ondaatje Prize. The Island of Missing Trees was a Sunday Times bestseller, and was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and the Women’s Prize for Fiction. There are Rivers in the Sky, which won an Edward Stanford Award for Fiction, is her latest novel.

Olesya Khromeychuk is a historian and writer. She is the author of The Death of a Soldier Told by His Sister (2022) and Undetermined Ukrainians (2013). Khromeychuk has written for The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, Prospect and The New Statesman, and has delivered a TED talk on ‘What the World Can Learn From Ukraine’s Fight for Democracy’. She has taught the history of East-Central Europe at several British universities and is currently the Director of the Ukrainian Institute London.