Air-raid alerts and frontline memoirs: Kyiv hosts literary festival amid war
Visitors flock to Book Arsenal in Ukraine’s capital as wartime writing takes centre stage It was a literary festival, all right, but if your reference
Visitors flock to Book Arsenal in Ukraine’s capital as wartime writing takes centre stage It was a literary festival, all right, but if your reference for such things is Hay-on-Wye and Edinburgh, or Melbourne and Sydney, or New York and Washington DC, then at Kyiv Book Arsenal you might think you had slipped through a crack in the universe and landed in an alternative reality.
For a start, they were so young, the audience members. Dressed in their considerable best, they clutched their bags of books bought directly from publishers’
stalls and stopped to hug their friends – the festival providing the perfect opportunity for a people-watching passeggiata through its venue, the city’s vast 18th-century
military arsenal. Continue reading...
The BriefWire