An Evening with Andrey Kurkov
The Literature and Politics of Ukraine

in conversation with Christina Lamb
Chief Foreign Correspondent
at The Sunday Times
Wednesday 11 June 2025, 7.00 - 8.00pm
Online from Milton Keynes Lit Fest
Also available to watch livestreamed 
into Buckingham Lit Fest’s auditorium
Tickets: £8/£6 (Zoom)
£10 (Livestreamed into The Vinson Centre, Buckingham)
All profits donated to charitable projects in Ukraine

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'At first we did not understand what war was.
You can't understand it until you see it and hear it.' - Diary of an Invasion

 

Ukraine’s most acclaimed novelist - from international bestseller Death and the Penguin to his latest Kyiv mystery, The Stolen Heart –   Andrey Kurkov is an ambassador not just for his country’s literature but also as a leading voice amplifying the importance of its culture, identity and independence.

 

Now known as a commentator and journalist on Ukraine for the international media, he is writing at the forefront of a 21st-century war, and will share with us his insights and reflections into the intersection of literature, politics and the irrepressible power of language.
 

His mother tongue is Russian: he learnt Ukrainian aged 14, in a Soviet school. At the time, he was curious that nobody spoke Ukrainian in Kyiv: he had only one schoolfriend from a Ukrainian-speaking family. After university he worked as an editor, editing novels translated into Ukrainian. He writes fiction in Russian, non-fiction in Russian, Ukrainian and English, and children's books, now mostly in Ukrainian. He has commented that 'Since [1999], I've got used to talking more about Ukraine than about my books. Because if you don't understand Ukraine, you probably won't understand my books.'

 

About Andrey Kurkov
Born near Leningrad in 1961, Andrey Kurkov was a journalist, prison warder, cameraman and screenplay-writer before achieving enormous success as a novelist. From Death and the Penguin – an international bestseller, translated into more than thirty languages – to his latest Kyiv mystery, The Stolen Heart, Kurkov’s fiction is celebrated for its deadpan irony and defiant dark humour.

 

His remarkable 2013 work of reportage, Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev was followed by the novels The Bickford Fuse, Grey Bees, and Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv (longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2023), as well as his non-fiction work Diary of an Invasion in 2022. Most recently, his novel The Silver Bone was longlisted for the 2024 International Booker Prize.

More about Andrey: 

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