Picture by PEN Ukraine and Sensor Media
UPDATE: Sunday, Mar 23, 2025 · 8:42:09 PM +00:00
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KyivGuy
Coincidentally, here is an astounding story by The Guardian: Ukraine’s clandestine book club defies Russia’s push to rewrite history.
“It must be one of the most dangerous book clubs in the world. Before they can feel safe enough to talk about poetry and prose, 17-year-old Mariika (not her real name) and her friends have to first ensure all the windows are shut and check there is no one lurking by the flat’s doors.
Informants frequently report anyone studying Ukrainian in the occupied territories to the Russian secret police. Ukrainian textbooks have been deemed “extremist” – possession can carry a sentence of five years.
Parents who allow their children to follow the Ukrainian curriculum online can lose parental rights. Teens who speak Ukrainian at school have been known to be taken by thugs to the woods for “questioning”.
Just a reminder that you can freely read these Ukrainian books while Ukrainians in the Russia-occupied territories can not. Treasure your rights and freedoms while you have them.
I have been longing to see this list for many years and even made my own attempts to compile one. Now, much more knowledgeable and qualified people than me finally did this work. I must admit I read only a fraction of these books, but, from what I can see, this is a very good list for a beginner reader.
The 100 Books are allocated into five broad categories:
1. Non-Fiction: History and Politics
2. Non-Fiction: Culture
3. Fiction and Prose (these are the household names every Ukrainian knows, mostly modern writers)
4. Poetry (more or less the same as 3 above)
5. Children's literature
The following text is a complete citation from the webpage of PEN Ukraine. Since it was produced for the promotion of Ukrainian literature, I hope I can do a full repost here, with due reference to the authors and the links to the source.
Finally, I wish to note that most of the modern authors referenced here are now actively engaged in the promotion of the Ukrainian cause and in raising funds to help Ukrainian humanitarian and war efforts. Therefore, by purchasing their books, you also support Ukraine.
"Prepared in cooperation of PEN Ukraine and Sensor Media
"What are they fighting for?" Unfortunately, even after eleven years of Russia’s war against Ukraine, this question is still asked by those who aren’t closely acquainted with the Ukrainian context. We still have to fight many intellectual battles for our identity, and literature can be an effective weapon – or rather a form of soft power – in this educational mission. Since regaining our independence, many books have been published that explain who we are and what we strive for. The translation market has been revived in the last decade, which created an opportunity for us to address the world with our own literature. An interest in the Ukrainian context has also grown abroad, giving rise to many high-quality (and mostly non-fiction) texts.
Many important and high-quality works have appeared on the global market in the years of independence. It would be impossible to cover all of them in a single review. Still, we have compiled a list of books we would like our friends and partners to read. It emerges as a response to many requests from foreign libraries, publishing houses, embassies, and institutions that would like to share knowledge about Ukraine with their audiences.
100 books from Ukraine or about Ukraine are presented in this selection. They were all published after 1991, were written in different genres, and communicate a wide range of topics. They each represent Ukrainian identity in their own way. Our list focuses on English, German and French translations.
NON-FICTION
History and politics
1. The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, Serhii Plokhy (ENG, DE, FR)
A must-have for getting to know the history of Ukraine! Located on the Western edge of the Eurasian steppe, Ukraine has always been a meeting place for empires – from Roman to Ottoman, from Habsburg to Russian – and each left their mark on the landscape, language, and society that developed within these fluctuating borders. In this historical survey, Harvard University professor Serhii Plokhy traces the development of Ukraine from the arrival of Vikings in the 10th century to Russia’s latest invasion and the annexation of Crimea.
2. I Will Mix Your Blood with Coal: Snapshots from the East of Ukraine, Oleksandr Mykhed (ENG, DE)
The author invites us on a painful yet hopeful journey through the Ukrainian east. He shares his conversations with locals, extracts from archival documents, and stories of the region’s prominent activists. In his view, the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk which British and Belgian investors, imperial and Soviet leaders long tried to subdue, are a small homeland of both ordinary miners and Ukrainian intellectuals.
3. Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine, Anne Applebaum (ENG, DE, FR)
This is a history of background and the course of one of Europe’s most terrible tragedies – the Holodomor – written by Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Applebaum. In this book, she convincingly dismantles a criminal Stalinist policy and proves what has been only a cautious suggestion even new: over 3 million Ukrainian peasants starved to death not because they were accidental victims of failed policies, but because they were deliberately killed by the state.
4. Survival as Victory: Ukrainian Women in the Gulag, Oksana Kis (ENG)
This is the first anthropological study of everyday life in Soviet forced labor camps from the perspective of more than 150 imprisoned women. Based upon the memories of eyewitnesses, the book describes the horrible everyday routines in labor camps and the amazing capacity of prisoners to preserve their own cultural identity, even under the harshest conditions. The author details the resistance of women against unbearable conditions in the camps by not only keeping their domestic traditions but also by frequently erasing regional and confessional distinctions.
5. Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, Timothy Snyder (ENG, DE)
A brilliant work on Europe in the 20th century under the rule of two bloody dictators, Hitler and Stalin. In the author’s own words, "this is a history of political mass murder. The fourteen million were all victims of a Soviet or Nazi killing policy, often of an interaction between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, but never casualties of the war between them." The American historian offers a panoramic analytical view from the outside, which, in his opinion, would be impossible in studies of the victim countries’ national histories.
6. World War II, Uncontrived and Unredacted: Testimonies from Ukraine, Vakhtang Kipiani (ENG, DE)
This book compiles fascinating and true family stories of Ukrainians who witnessed World War II. Articles gathered from the popular website Istorychna Pravda depict the most awful war of the 20th century through the stories of eyewitnesses and their descendants. These are people who fought in different armies, faced the horrors of deportation, were put into forced labor or were destined to remain forever young in hell fires of war.
7. Jews and Ukrainians: A Millennium of Co-Existence, Paul Robert Magocsi, Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern (ENG)
This book sheds light on some of the controversial aspects of Ukrainian-Jewish relations and shows that historical experiences in Ukraine not only divided but also united Ukrainians and Jews. The history of these relations is presented in twelve thematic chapters that cover a wide range of social interactions. 335 full-color illustrations, 29 maps, and several text inserts help explain specific phenomena or focus on contradictory issues complement the story.
8. Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, Timothy Snyder (ENG, DE)
We imagine Holocaust as the Nazi-designed death factory, yet by the time the gas chambers came into effect, more than a million of European Jews had already been shot at point-blank range over pits and hollows. In this historical research, Timothy Snyder dismantles the misbelief that Holocaust was a one-off tragedy. He reminds his audience of missed history lessons and treats this unparalleled crime in a very innovative way.
9. Poland and Ukraine. Entangled Histories, Asymmetric Memories, Andrii Portnov (ENG)
In this essay, Professor Andrii Portnov reviews the paths that formed some of the primary historical stereotypes in Polish-Ukrainian relations and makes arguments to rebut them. In that endeavor, he analyzes the legacy of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Cossack mythology, the Polish-Ukrainian battle for Lviv in 1918, the ethnic cleansing of the Volhynian Poles in 1943, the activity of Jerzy Giedroyc’s Krytyka, and the post-Soviet memory wars and projects of reconciliation.
10. Courage and Fear, Ola Hnatiuk (ENG)
This book is a thoroughly documented portrait of Lviv’s ethnically diverse circle of intellectuals during WWII. As Soviet, Nazi, and, once again, Soviet occupation stirred up the city’s social structure, groups of Polish, Ukrainian and Jewish doctors, scholars, and artists tried to cast aside their differences and get along towards the common goal of survival. The author uses numerous sources in different languages to tell the history of Lviv from a polyethnic perspective and challenge nationalistic narratives that reign in Central and Eastern Europe.
11. The Conflict in Ukraine: What Everyone Needs to Know, Serhy Yekelchyk (ENG)
Published in 2015, this book serves as an attempt to explain Ukrainian identity to the Western world after the Russian invasion. According to the author, admitting Ukrainian sovereignty as a separate nation had been a litmus test for Russian democracy over the past 150 years, and the Russian threat towards Ukraine will remain while the Putin regime is in power. The reader is led through Ukraine’s history of becoming a sovereign state, the consequences of communism, the Orange Revolution, and the Revolution of Dignity, the annexation of Crimea, the beginning of the war, and the Western world’s attempts to establish peace.
12. The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution, Marci Shore (ENG)
"What is worth dying for?" This is a question that Eastern Europe researcher Marci Shore asks herself in this intimate essay on the Ukrainian Revolution of Dignity. While the world contemplated the uprising on the Maidan as another episode in geopolitics, Ukrainians lived through the Revolution as an existential transformation during the months of the extraordinary winter of 2013-2014. Blurring the boundaries of day and night, losing the perception of time, the sudden disappearance of fear, and the urgency of making a choice constituted a seismic shift that is now absolutely necessary to understand the Ukrainian resistance against Russia’s full-scale invasion.
13. The Torture Camp on Paradise Street, Stanislav Aseyev (ENG, DE)
Ukrainian journalist and writer Stanislav Aseyev details his experience of being imprisoned in the FSB-controlled torture camp Izolyatsia located in occupied Donetsk. His memoir contains descriptions of the endless days of mental and physical abuse, including tortures and rapes that the author and his fellow detainees experienced during his nearly three years of illegal imprisonment in 2015-2017. Aseyev reflects on how one can survive such atrocities and not lose their own humanity but instead return to the world and tell their story out loud.
14. In Isolation: Dispatches from Occupied Donbas, Stanislav Aseyev (ENG, DE)
In this collection of essays, Stanislav Aseyev, the Ukrainian journalist, Donetsk region native, and ex-political prisoner of the Kremlin, attempts to understand why Russian propaganda finds success among the residents of the industrial Donbas, where he spent the first years of Russian occupation. His texts contain little politics, but they are full of in-depth reflection. This is the first time that an insider’s story depicts the real losses of human lives and civil liberties due to Russia’s ongoing hybrid war on the territory of Ukraine.
15. Diary of a Hunger Striker and Four and a Half Steps, Oleh Sentsov (ENG, DE)
This is the prison diary of Ukrainian filmmaker Oleh Sentsov, who spent five years wrongfully imprisoned by the Kremlin regime. His story begins in May 2018, on the third day of his 145-day hunger strike, which became a political manifesto and a call for release of Ukrainian political prisoners. Sentsov describes his thoughts and emotions during the hunger strike, introduces the reader to other prisoners of the regime, recalls the events of the Revolution of Dignity he participated in, and sheds light on the mechanisms of a merciless prison system.
16. The Russo-Ukrainian War, Serhii Plokhy (ENG)
A comprehensive history of Russia’s war against Ukraine which has lasted since 2014. The author traces the beginning and evolution of the conflict from the very collapse of the Russian Empire to the rise and fall of the USSR all the way to the development of democratic politics in Ukraine. Based on his decades-long research and unique understanding of the region, he shows that Ukraine’s defiance of Russia and the demonstration of unity and strength by the Western allies has become a major challenge to Putin’s great-power ambitions and polarized the world even more along a new axis.
17. The Lost Island: Tales from the Occupied Crimea, Nataliya Gumenyuk (DE)
A reportage collection from occupied Crimea visited by the author between the years 2014 and 2019. Ideologically different voices of the peninsula – entrepreneurs and retirees, Crimean Tatars, students and activists, human rights defenders and military servicemen – talk about the changes that the occupation brought into their life and whether they still have room for Ukraine in it. While one person tries to give voice to their silent pain, another feels sick and tired of fear. This book constitutes the voice of occupied Crimea in its whole polyphony of individual destinies that merge into a common narrative that is far from completion.
18. The Crimea Question: Identity, Transition, and Conflict, Gwendolyn Sasse (ENG)
At the beginning and in the middle of the 1990s, Western media, politicians, and scholars warned that, after the collapse of the USSR, Crimea could become the center of disturbances. Nevertheless, no large-scale conflict happened in Crimea. Kyiv officials succeeded in making the peninsula part of the Ukrainian state. This book examines the factors that led to a mostly peaceful transition and observes the situation in the wider context of conflict prevention. A bitter irony, though, lies in the fact that it was published amidst the Russian invasion of the peninsula in 2014.
19. Ukraine's Maidan, Russia's War: A Chronicle and Analysis of the Revolution of Dignity, Mychailo Wynnyckyj (ENG)
The Revolution of Dignity created a new Ukrainian identity – territorial, inclusive, modern, focused on a European future, and capable of fabulously mobilizing resources. When Russia invaded, Ukrainians responded with mass volunteer movements and poignant patriotism. Through this process, they transformed their country, region, and even the whole world. This book chronicles the Ukrainian Maidan and the ongoing war, along with an analysis of the Revolution of Dignity from the perspective of an observer and participant.
20. The Ukrainian Mentality, Alexander Strashny (ENG)
What determines Ukrainians as a nation and forces them to act when their identity becomes endangered? Alexander Strashny, a qualified psychoanalyst, examines Ukrainian history, everyday life, economics, warfare, religion, arts, and other cultural aspects to define the peculiarities of the mentality that sets Ukrainians apart as a distinct nation. Through his research of the similarities and differences between Ukrainians and Europeans, as well as Ukrainians and Russians, Strashny identifies the fifty most typical features of the Ukrainian mindset that merge to create the essence of the Ukrainian mentality.
Culture
21. Our Others: Stories of Ukrainian Diversity, Olesya Yaremchuk (ENG, DE)
Our Others is a dive into both the origins and individual experiences of fourteen ethnic minorities residing on the territory of today’s Ukraine – Czechs, Slovaks, Meskhetian Turks, Swedes, Romanians, Hungarians, Jews, Gagauz, Crimean Tatars and others. Based on a combination of academic methods, field research, and interviews, Olesya Yaremchuk’s literary reportages depict realistic, thorough, and historically grounded pictures of how these different groups ended up in Ukraine, how they navigated turbulent periods, and how lived leading up to the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
22. The Price of Our Freedom: Essays, Yuri Andrukhovych (DE)
What does Ukrainian society aspire to? What is Ukraine’s place in Europe? Like a voice crying in the wilderness, Yuri Andrukhovych kept reminding European intellectuals about Russia’s great-power ambitions at every occasion. Like a Sisyphus of European understanding, he asked to not let Ukraine out of sight. The Price of Our Freedom combines the most pressing texts written between the years 2014 and 2023.
23. Ukraine in Histories and Stories: Essays by Ukrainian Intellectuals (ENG)
This is a collection of essays by Ukrainian writers, philosophers, historians, political scholars, and opinion leaders that combines reflections on Ukrainian history and analysis of its present period with a delineation of conceptual ideas and real-life stories. The authors present the many-faced image of Ukraine’s reality and memory by addressing topics from the Holodomor to Maidan, from Russian aggression to cultural diversity, from the depth of the past to the challenges of the present. The book was first published by the Internews Ukraine and UkraineWorld with support from the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation.
24. The Authentic Ukrainian Kitchen: Recipes from a Native Chef, Yevhen Klopotenko (ENG)
This is not just another collection of national cuisine recipes. In this book, Yevhen Klopotenko, a world-renowned chef and Ukraine’s food ambassador, shares upgraded recipes of the dishes that best exemplify the unique food heritage of our country. These recipes come from extensive research into authentic Ukrainian cuisine formed by traditions, geography, and agriculture before it underwent macabre Soviet influence. A must-have for enthusiasts of Ukraine who enjoy cooking!
25. Ukraine. Food and History, Olena Braichenko, Maryna Hrymych (ENG, FR)
Now more than ever it is critical for Ukrainian culture – and particularly its cuisine – to be known around the globe. This is a perfectly illustrated coffee table book that contains traditional Ukrainian recipes and fascinating stories about Ukraine’s food history. It provides cultural context, presenting Ukrainian cuisine as part of intangible cultural heritage. The book also investigates the potential of food projects as an integral element of cultural diplomacy.
26. Vasyl Stus: Life in Creativity, Dmytro Stus (ENG)
How do you explain the phenomenon of glory? Why did Vasyl Stus, a brilliant poet and dissident from the east of Ukraine, become famous only after his reburial in 1989? In his attempt to give an answer to this and some other questions, Dmytro Stus, a literary scholar who is also the poet’s son, masterly combines a cultural and biographical study with his own family history and observations to provide a paradoxically multi-genre book where academic analysis merge with novel narration.
27. Ukrainian Dissidents Under Soviet Power, Vakhtang Kipiani (DE)
Historian Vakhtang Kipiani offers a series of interviews with Ukrainian dissidents who deliberately and conceptually confronted the Soviet regime. The 20 dissidents reflect on the price and value of freedom. Among the interviewees are Mustafa Dzhemilev (Cemilev), the defender of Crimean Tatar rights, Levko Lukyanenko, founding member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, Nadiia Svitlychna, member of the Sixtiers’ movement, human rights activist, and journalist, and many others.
28. A Land of the Female Sex: Ukrainian Women's Fates in the 20th and 21st Centuries, Vakhtang Kipiani (DE)
Outstanding women of the 20th century often worked under cover: this is why many of them still aren’t well known to the general public. Nevertheless, their role in Ukrainian history must not be underestimated because, without them, it would have turned out differently. This book contains interviews, testimonies, archive documents, and recollection of the outstanding women of Ukraine gathered by the famous Ukrainian online project, Istorychna Pravda. Among the materials, there is a unique interview with Kvitka Cisyk and articles about Dr. Rosalia Vynnychenko (née Lifshyts), underground fighter Iryna Tymochko, writer Olena Teliha, and many other Ukrainian women.
29. The Post-Chornobyl Library: Ukrainian Postmodernism of the 1990s, Tamara Hundorova (ENG)
The Chornobyl tragedy marked the collapse of the USSR and connected the postmodern era in Western Europe with nuclear consciousness. The post-Chornobyl library in Hundorova’s book becomes a metaphor for the new Ukrainian literature of the 1990s. Ukrainian post-modernism proves to be post-traumatic writing and depicts the collisions of the post-Soviet era, along with the processes of Ukrainian culture’s decolonization. The carnivalization of the apocalypse is the main paradigm of the post-Chornobyl text: on this path, a post-Chornobyl protagonist becomes an ironist, meets the Other, experiences the collapse of self-identity, and witnesses the changes of geocultural landscapes.
30. Catching an Elusive Bird: The Life of Hryhorii Skovoroda, Leonid Ushkalov (ENG)
Based on a solid selection of sources, Leonid Ushkalov presents a biography of the famous Ukrainian philosopher and theologist Hryhorii Skovoroda (1722–1794). The scholar also depicts the modus vivendi and development of Ukrainian culture in the 18th century. The eleven chapters of this non-fiction book are framed by two stories – a prelude and a finale. They aim to artistically enforce the biography of Skovoroda and highlight his central role in the Ukrainian spiritual tradition.
31. A Ukrainian Christmas, Yaroslav Hrytsak, Nadiyka Gerbish (ENG, DE)
This wonderful Christmas encyclopedia explains the cultural peculiarities and all the historical complexities of the holiday in Ukraine throughout the centuries. The descriptions of Christmas traditions, historical insights, and recipes are beautifully illustrated, so the book takes the form of a very elegant deluxe edition. This is both a fascinating guide to Ukrainian Christmas and a powerful reminder that one should maintain their own culture and beliefs even when others are attempting to erase them.
32. Permanent Revolution: Art in Ukraine, the 20th to the Early 21st Century, Alisa Lozhkina (ENG, FR)
Written by a leading Ukrainian curator and art critic, this book is an attempt to cover the history of the development of visual arts in Ukraine from the emergence of modernism to present days. Particular attention is paid to the period of independence. How has the language of art changed throughout the last 150 years? What role did the turbulent flow of history play in this process? This analysis provides a brief review of the main developments and phenomena of Ukrainian art, along with diverse illustrative material from dozens of museums and private collections, as well as artist and family archives.
33. Treasures of Ukraine: A Nation's Cultural Heritage (ENG)
From Byzantine icons and wooden churches to cathedrals, the works of folk artists and the masterpieces of the avant-garde, Treasures of Ukraine speaks about the abundant heritage and art of a country now facing damage and devastation. Commentary is provided by famous artists, curators, and critics who explain the nation’s complicated history and how it influences the present day. This history covers the development of ancient cultures (Trypillia, Scythia) to early modern states (Kyivan Rus and the Cossack Hetmanate) and the works of our contemporaries.
34. The Art of Ukraine, Alisa Lozhkina (ENG)
This book can be used as a starter’s guide to Ukrainian art from the early 1900s until today. Curator and art critic Alisa Lozhkina offers detailed insight into Ukrainian modernist, avant-garde, and post-modern art movements in the context of Ukraine’s political life and artistic formation during the turbulent decades of the Soviet era and regained independence.
35. Ukraine Rising: Contemporary Creative Culture from Ukraine (ENG)
The last decade in Ukraine has seen a powerful burst in the creative industries, such as interior design, fashion, architecture, photography, craftwork, etc. Young Ukrainian creators are characterized by the eclectic aesthetics of their work – a bizarre combination of tradition and the achievements of modernity. This attracts the world! Ukraine Rising celebrates the best Ukrainian creative projects with high-quality photos and poignant texts from experts. Creative publishing house Gestalten and Ukrainian publisher Lucia Bondar come together to show us a Ukrainian creative spirit and energy that promises us a better future.
36. The Beauty of Ukraine: Landscape Photography, Lucia Bondar, Yevhen Samuchenko (ENG)
Odesa-born Ukrainian photographer Yevhen Samuchenko has won many awards for his amazing landscape photographs. This photo book reveals the beauty of his homeland from the air. Lemurian Lake, whose unusual pink colour makes it look like a work of art on land; a canyon near Kherson that looks like a graphic among the lush green landscape; poppy and lavender fields fascinating with their uncompromising colour; winter landscapes with their monumental silence and reduction – this is how the beauty of Ukraine is depicted in this book.
37. Icons on Ammo Boxes, Sonya Atlantova, Oleksandr Klymenko (ENG)
This book emerged from an art project titled, "Icons on Lids of Ammunition Boxes," initiated and led by Sofiia (Sonya) Atlantova and Oleksandr Klymenko. Painted on fragments of empty cartridge containers brought back from the front, the icons are silent witnesses to Russia’s covert war against Ukraine in the Donets Basin from 2014-2021. At the same time, they are testimony to the victory of life over death— not only symbolically but also in real terms. Since the spring of 2015, the project has been a volunteer initiative whose revenues support the Pirogov First Volunteer Mobile Hospital. The contributors to the book include Volodymyr Rafeyenko, Hennadiy Druzenko, Archimandrite Kyrylo Hovorun, George Weigel, and Zoya Chegusova.
38. Absolute Zero, Artem Chekh (ENG, DE)
Many Europeans are still unaware that a war is raging on our continent. Meanwhile, different generations of Ukrainians have been experiencing the reality of war firsthand for the past decade. Young Ukrainian author Artem Chekh lived and wrote in Kyiv when he was mobilized into the army in 2015. He ended up a soldier on the front in the east of Ukraine and started maintaining this deeply intimate diary of quiet pain and everyday war.
39. The Language of War, Oleksandr Mykhed (ENG)
"We were so happy and didn’t know it…"A young writer lives in a quiet European suburb with his wife and his dog. His parents buy an apartment nearby. Life goes on as usual. Then the invaders come. The Language of War is about what happens when your world changes overnight. When you wake up to the sound of helicopters and the smell of gunpowder. When your home is hit by shells or broken into by gunmen, and you spend another night in a basement-turned-bomb shelter. Somehow, you must find the words to describe this new reality, when the language of war is the only language you’ll be able to speak from now on. Oleksandr Mykhed starts keeping his diary and then he enlists in the army.
40. The Death of a Soldier Told by His Sister, Olesya Khromeychuk (ENG)
"If you read only one book about the war, this is the one to read." This is what Henry Marsh, the famous brain surgeon and writer, said about The Death of a Soldier. Olesya Khromeychuk's brother Volodymyr died on the frontline in the east of Ukraine, killed by shrapnel as he served in the Ukrainian Armed Forces. As Khromeychuk tries to come to terms with losing her brother, she also tries to process the Russian invasion of Ukraine: as a historian of war, as a woman, and as a sister. Beautifully written and giving unique, poignant insight into the lives of those affected, it is an urgent act of resistance against the dehumanising cruelty of war.
41. Behind Blue Eyes (ENG)
The Behind Blue Eyes project is a conceptual life story in wartime, which culminated in this eponymous photo book. The project idea was to give children from liberated and frontline villages single-use film cameras and ask them to document different moments of their everyday life. And this collection of children’s wartime photographs emerged. Dozens of personal stories are hidden behind the footage. The project has a charitable goal: the authors use the money raised from book sales to grant the wishes of children from frontline territories.
42. Stories from Ukraine (ENG)
The Stories from Ukraine series is a collection of narrative nonfiction contained in three books— Believers, Fighters, and Keepers. Inside, you will find the true personal stories of ordinary yet extraordinary Ukrainians who are shaping their country’s history during war. They span multiple generations and come from different social backgrounds, but they all have one thing in common: they value freedom above all else and are ready to fight for it until victory is achieved. Each story features two unique, powerful voices: one belongs to the storyteller and the other to the professional author documenting the story and reflecting it through their own experience of life and war in Ukraine.
43. We Who Have Changed, Daria Badior, Anastasiia Platonova (ENG, DE)
In this collection of essays, Ukrainian cultural figures reflect on their lives during war, speaking through their experiences and documenting shifts caused by the full-scale invasion. The ten essays tell stories about leaving homes, intellectual and professional reinventions, the emotional burden of witnessing, and attempts to explain this war’s cultural pretexts to people outside Ukraine.
FICTION. PROSE
44. Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex, Oksana Zabuzhko (ENG, DE, FR)
One of the most influential books to emerge from independent Ukraine, Field Work in Ukrainian Sex by Oksana Zabuzhko is the tale of one woman’s personal revolt provoked by the top literary scandal of the decade. This feminist novel tells the story of a complicated relationship between the Ukrainian poetess Oksana and the ambitious sculptor Mykola. It is also the canvas of the female protagonist’s self-reflection on her sexuality, personal development, and cultural and national identity.
45. The Museum of Abandoned Secrets, Oksana Zabuzhko (ENG, DE)
Spanning sixty tumultuous years of Ukrainian history, this multigenerational saga weaves a dramatic and intricate web of love, sex, friendship, and death. At its center: three women linked by the abandoned secrets of the past―secrets that refuse to remain hidden. While researching a story, journalist Daryna unearths a worn photograph of Olena Dovgan, a member of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army killed in 1947 by Stalin’s secret police. Intrigued, Daryna sets out to make a documentary about extraordinary woman―and unwittingly opens a door to the past that will change the course of the future.
46. Oh Sister, My Sister, Oksana Zabuzhko (ENG, DE)
Intense relationships between sisters or girls are the central focus of this short story collection. Compositionally, it consists of memories and stories about females of different ages and in different life circumstances. At the same time, personal and political narratives of Ukraine from the perspective of female narrators who grew up in different times and conditions become clearly visible. First published in 2003, this book has already become a modern classic, just like the author’s many other works.
47. The Orphanage, Serhiy Zhadan (ENG, DE)
A searing novel that excavates the human collateral damage wrought by the ongoing conflict in the east of Ukraine. When hostile soldiers invade a neighboring city, Pasha, a thirty-five-year-old Ukrainian language teacher, sets out for his nephew Sasha, who lives in an orphanage in occupied territory. Venturing into combat zones, traversing shifting borders, and forging uneasy alliances along the way, Pasha realizes where his true loyalties lie in an increasingly desperate fight to rescue Sasha and bring him home.
48. Voroshilovgrad, Serhiy Zhadan (ENG, DE)
The bleak industrial landscape of the now-war-torn Ukrainian east sets the stage for Voroshilovgrad, the Soviet-era name of Luhansk, mixing magical realism and an exhilarating road novel in poetic, powerful, and expressive prose. A city-dwelling executive heads home to take over his brother's gas station after his unexplained disappearance, but all he finds at home are mysteries and ghosts. Trapped near his childhood town, German strives for the answers to many questions about himself: what’s important to him, what keeps him alive, and what’s worth fighting for.
49. Earth Gods: Writings from Before the War, Taras Prokhasko (ENG)
Set between the two world wars near Ialivets, in the Ukrainian Carpathian Mountains, this novel documents the collapse of the grand narratives of the past, embodied here by the Carpathian earth gods. A master of reflexive, finely nuanced prose, Prokhasko weaves together narrative strands testifying to the sophistication and integration of Ukrainian culture with world culture.
50. The Moscoviad, Yuri Andrukhovych (ENG, DE, FR)
The days of a young poet and student of the Literary Institute in Moscow are full of endless booze parties and sexual adventures. One day, though, this routine leads him to the Moscow subway where he witnesses a terrible symposium of the famous dead.
The Moscoviad is a cult novel of the famous Ukrainian writer Yuri Andrukhovych. It is tightly packed with grotesque and surrealistic moments, along with descriptions of the reality of the communist empire’s collapse. Written over 30 years ago – in 1992 – it seems relevant today as that very empire is finally and inevitably collapsing.
51. Recreations, Yuri Andrukhovych (ENG, DE)
Four poets and an entourage of secondary characters converge on the fictional town of Chortopil for the Festival of the Resurrecting Spirit, an orgy of popular culture, civic dysfunction, national pride, and sex. A novel of carnivalesque vitality and acute social criticism, it celebrates newly found freedom and reflects upon the contradictions of post-Soviet society. Recreations established Andrukhovych as a sophisticated yet seductively readable comic writer with penetrating insights into his volatile times.
52. Lexicon of Intimate Cities, Yuri Andrukhovych (DE)
A post-Soviet urban nomad, Yuri Andrukhovych wanders across the globe and tells us his voyaging tales. He describes the sociology of street music in Berlin, the abandoned gardens of Detroit, travels across Odesa, Kharkiv, Paris, Prague, Stuttgart, Toronto, Uzhhorod, and Venice… Altogether, this makes a lexicon of 111 localities on three continents. This unusual collection of Andrukhovych’s essays combines genuine stories and political controversy, clichés and insights, jokes and novel drafts.
53. Carbide, Andriy Lyubka (ENG)
A drunken teacher dreams up a hairbrained scheme to dig a tunnel from Ukraine to Hungary to force the EU to grant Ukraine admission by smuggling its entire population into a member country. Hilarity inevitably ensues, along with danger, when Tys, the would-be ‘Moses of Ukraine’, recruits a gang of local smugglers, including a modern-day Icarus determined to fly over the border and a femme fatale who traffics human organs. This is a vivid, humorous, and totally adventurous novel written by young Ukrainian author Andriy Lyubka.
54. The House in Baiting Hollow, Vasyl Makhno (DE)
A short story volume of the US-based Ukrainian author Vasyl Makhno. He writes not only about the lives of immigrants and daily American reality, but he also sheds light onto the Jewish history of his hometown of Chortkiv in the Ternopil region, sex at a bus stop, a stolen bike, squirrels on a roof, household trivia, love, and death. The concept of home becomes an omnipresent mystical metaphor in his writing, present in contemplation, memories, and emotions.
55. Felix Austria, Sofia Andrukhovych (ENG, DE, FR)
At the turn of the twentieth century, two young women find themselves in Stanyslaviv under Austro-Hungarian rule. Adela, the daughter of a wealthy German doctor, and Stefania, her orphan Ukrainian servant, could not be further apart socially and economically; but their fates intertwine in the cityscape of the late Habsburg Empire, densely inhabited for centuries by Ukrainians, Poles, Germans, and Jews. In Felix Austria, Sophia Andrukhovych uses techniques from Gothic literature to reconstruct with astonishing detail the atmosphere and everyday life of Stanyslaviv. Felix Austria is a must-read for all those who seek to understand Ukraine’s deep ties with Western Europe and its struggle to break away from Russia’s orbit.
56. Amadoka, Sofia Andrukhovych (DE)
Archivist Romana believes that she has recognized her missing husband Bohdan as a nameless soldier who returned from the war in Donbas in 2014. The man is too crippled to be properly recognized and too severely traumatized to remember. Romana attempts to restore his memory and identity by telling him about herself. Amadoka (published as a series of three separate books in Germany) constitutes a brilliant metaphor of Ukraine’s past and present. This voluminous book is, at the same time, a universal parable of memory and oblivion in love, society, and history.
57. Cecil the Lion Had to Die, Olena Stiazhkina (ENG, DE)
In Cecil the Lion Had to Die, Olena Stiazhkina follows four families whose children were welcomed into the world in a Donetsk maternity ward in 1986 Soviet Ukraine. They experience radical transformations as the Soviet Union unexpectedly implodes, independent Ukraine emerges, and neo-imperial Russia occupies Ukrainian territory— Crimea and parts of Donbas in 2014. Just as Stiazhkina’s decision to transition to writing in Ukrainian as part of her civic stance — seen in this book that begins in Russian and ends in Ukrainian — the stark choices of family members take them in different directions, presenting a multifaceted and nuanced Donbas.
58. The Tears and Smiles of Things: Stories, Sketches, Meditations, Andriy Sodomora (ENG)
Inspired by Virgil’s exquisitely ambivalent phrase "sunt lacrimae rerum", Andriy Sodomora, the Ukrainian "voice" of classical antiquity, has produced a series of original vignettes and essays about the big and small things in our lives. The selected stories presented here are the first English translations of Sodomora’s profoundly intellectual and intertextual prose. Through his nostalgic memories and recollections, Sodomora takes readers on a journey through western Ukraine, as well as through world literature, from ancient Greece and Rome to the poetry of Paul Verlaine and Federico García Lorca.
59. Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love, Volodymyr Rafeyenko (ENG)
The novel tells the story of Haba Habinsky, a refugee from Ukraine’s Donbas region, who has escaped to the capital city of Kyiv at the onset of the Russo-Ukrainian war. His physical dislocation―and his subsequent willful adoption of the Ukrainian language―place the protagonist in a state of disorientation during which he is forced to challenge his convictions. Fittingly, Volodymyr Rafeyenko’s novel Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love explores the ways that memory and language construct our identity, and how we hold on to it no matter what. Taking on crucial topics stirred by Russian aggression that began in 2014, the novel stands out for the innovative and probing manner in which it dissects them, while providing a fresh Donbas perspective on Ukrainian identity.
60. What Is Told, Askold Melnyczuk (ENG)
In a spirited narrative that travels from old Ukraine to New Jersey, Askold Melnyczuk follows his character through the betrayals of war and the promises of marriage. Zenon and Natalka marry the day Archduke Ferdinand is shot in Sarajevo. Zenon’s brother Stefan, meanwhile, renounces the abstractions of nationalism for his two mistresses, a mother and daughter. Transplanted to the strange soil of the new world by the upheavals of World War II, the family finds itself unprepared for the subtle sabotages of peacetime suburbia. With the ghosts of their extraordinary past never far away, the voyagers resort to the strategies learned in the struggle against the Tartars, Nazis, and Communists. The results are as comic as they are unexpected.
61. Stalking the Atomic City, Markiyan Kamysh (ENG)
The Chornobyl Exclusion Zone is, for many, a symbol of total disaster: a reminder of shattered ideals and lost lives, now a toxic, dangerous no-man's-land. For Markiyan Kamysh, it became a site of pilgrimage. Kamysh, the son of a Chornobyl disaster liquidator, takes us with him into this alien world. In electric prose that captures the spectral beauty of the Zone and the reckless spirit of the stalkers, Kamysh tells of hallucinatory journeys alone amid the rusted ruins, of frantic brushes with police and moments of ecstatic oblivion in the wasteland. Written with gonzo energy and brash lyricism, Stalking the Atomic City is a vital, singular document of this dystopian reality.
62. Oblivion, Tania Malarczuk (DE)
A woman depressed by an unhappy relationship suffers from panic attacks and doesn’t leave her apartment for months. At some point, she begins taking strength from an iconic figure in Ukrainian history – Vyacheslav Lypynskyi. A historian, philosopher and politician, he was born into a noble Polish family but preferred to identify himself as Ukrainian. Oblivion is an exquisitely written novel that clearly illustrates the effects of having a personality made up of fear, obedience, and oblivion.
63. Fairy-Tales of My Bomb-Shelter, Oleksii Chupa (DE)
A hot July in Makiivka, in the east of Ukraine. An ordinary apartment block with its ordinary inhabitants. An insane hedonist, Vira who lives on the first floor, celebrates the apocalypse with her bodyguards, armed with guns, and vodka. Vira is just one protagonist of this ‘happy house’. Twelve apartments represent the twelve lives of different people who end up connected by terrible circumstances during the turbulent year of 2014.
64. Nouvelles d'Ukraine (FR)
In this French collection of Ukrainian prose, six prominent Ukrainian authors – Yuri Andrukhovych, Oksana Zabuzhko, Serhiy Zhadan, Taras Prokhasko, Maria Matios, and Andriy Kurkov – prove by example that Ukrainian literature, though still lesser-known worldwide, is elegant and sophisticated. Through their prose, Ukraine appears as a multifaceted, complex country with a colorful history worthy of the attention of a French audience.
65. The Night Reporter: A 1938 Lviv Murder Mystery, Yuri Vynnychuk (ENG)
The events of the novel The Night Reporter take place in Lviv in 1938. Journalist Marko Krylovych, nicknamed the "night reporter" for his nightly coverage of the life of the city's underbelly, takes on a murder investigation involving a candidate for president of the city government. Police Commissioner Roman Obukh, who was suspended by administrators from the investigation, aids him in an unofficial capacity. Meanwhile, German and Soviet spies become involved, and Polish counterintelligence also takes an interest in the case. The picturesque and vividly described criminal world of 1930s Lviv appears before us, depicted by probably the most Galician Ukrainian writer Yuri Vynnychuk.
66. Precursor: A Novel about Ukrainian Philosopher Hryhoriy Skovoroda, Vasyl Shevchuk (ENG)
Hryhoriy Skovoroda (1722–1794), dubbed a "wandering" philosopher, was one of the most colourful figures in 18th century Ukraine. Precursor is a panoramic, factually accurate novel, painting a realistic picture of life in the Russian Empire. It is an illustration of the epitaph on Skovoroda’s gravestone: "The world pursued me, but failed to catch me."
67. Collection of Passions, Natalka Sniadanko (DE)
Natalka Sniadnako’s debut coming-of-age book is a collection of passions of a young lady from a "respectable Galician family". This multicultural, humorous, and ironic novel entertains the reader with "mysteries of a man’s soul," "the essence of premarital sex," "windows for roughnecks," and "a guide into a genuine Galician lady." It also attempts to explore "the issue of passion in the national context".
68. Warm Arctic Nights, Yuri Tarnavsky (ENG)
A whirlwind and profoundly fascinating memory of a boy’s childhood in pre-war Poland and Ukraine during WWII. In this novel, bellicose and masculine postulates portend the offensive of fear and inhumanity. Riddled with elegant irony and surrealism, Warm Arctic Nights constitutes a very special act of remembrance and love. Yuri Tarnavsky was a co-founder of the New York Group of Poets – an avant garde movement of Ukrainian refugee writers and artists. Based in the US, he writes fiction in Ukrainian and English languages.
69. Sweet Darusya: A Tale Of Two Villages, Maria Matios (ENG, FR, DE)
She is a quiet and reclusive woman. Her fellow citizens even consider her insane. Darusya never talks to others, but her thoughts flow undisturbed. It’s only at her father’s grave that she can speak out loud. What is behind her suffering?
The protagonist’s dramatic story is a backdrop for the storyline of her parents, whose lives were ruined by the NKVD when the western part of Ukraine was occupied by Soviet forces. Sweet Darusya is undoubtedly one of the most significant books in the era of Ukrainian independence.
70. Cult, Lyubko Deresh (FR, DE)
Yurko Banzai is a biology student from Lviv. He comes to a small Carpathian town to work as an assistant teacher at the local college. Strapped for money, he uses sheet music for Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman instead of wallpaper in his gable room where he smokes a pipe, listens to Pink Floyd and King Crimson, and practices the art of lucid dreaming which leads him to the library of Babel.
This novel, masterfully written by a 16-year-old, was first considered a hoax of famous Galician authors. Today we know that the author of this phantasmagoric story is a young man who humbly calls himself a follower of Stephen King and H. P. Lovecraft.
71. Wozzeck, Yuri Izdryk (ENG)
Izdryk's Wozzeck is one of the masterpieces of contemporary Ukrainian literature and a cult classic for the Ukrainian 1990s generation. Discerning at the dusk of romanticism the thickening gloom of an ever more godless age, in 1836 Georg Buchner dramatized the story of the hapless and homicidal barber Woyzeck. On the ruins of an old Europe destroyed by the First World War, Alban Berg gave Buchner's hero voice in the shrieks and moans of his atonal opera, Wozzeck. In the 1990s, Yuri Izdryk, in turn, made Wozzeck the Everyman of the turn of the third millennium. Anguished and disoriented, betrayed by love and the frailties of his body, Izdryk's Wozzeck is a victim of the phantoms of his mind and of the grotesque society that excludes him.
72. Contemporary Ukrainian Prose and Poetry (ENG)
Ukrainian fiction can now be read in a legendary fashion magazine. Under this special cover, Vogue Ukraine has brought together the voices of Ukrainian writers and poets living in Ukraine and abroad. The texts gathered in this anthology were commissioned by Vogue — most of them were created after the outbreak of full-scale war. They tell of trembling love and bitter pain, of unusual adventures and secret dreams, of Ukrainian archetypes, artifacts, and of historical reflections. The publication of fiction in a fashion magazine symbolizes the unity of Ukrainian cultural industries against the challenges of the present.
POETRY
73. What We Live For, What We Die For: Selected Poems, Serhiy Zhadan (ENG)
This is the first collection of world-renowned Ukrainian writer Serhiy Zhadan’s poetry in English translation. These robust and accessible narrative poems feature gutsy portraits of life on wartorn and poverty-ravaged streets, where children tally the number of local deaths, where mothers live with low expectations, and where romance lives like a remote memory. In the tradition of Tom Waits, Charles Bukowski, and William S. Burroughs, Zhadan creates a new poetics of loss. Yet despite the grimness of these portraits, Zhadan’s poems are familiar and enchanting, lit by the magic of everyday detail, leaving readers with a sense of hope.
74. A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails, Halyna Kruk (ENG)
Critics called this book "a guide to Ukraine’s emotional struggle". These stunning poems of witness by one of Ukraine's most revered poets are by turns breathless, philosophical, and visionary. Halyna Kruk’s poetry collection was published amidst the war, in May 2023, and became a mournful but increasingly loud voice of Ukrainians worldwide. Leading readers into the world's darkest spaces, Kruk implies that the light of language can nevertheless afford some measure of protection.
75. A Ukrainian Dictionary of War (ENG)
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was also an attack on its language, which is being further embraced by Ukrainians, despite the efforts of the invader. Language itself transforms during wartime. A Ukrainian Dictionary of War began with the fragments of experiences spoken in the new language of life under war. In 2022, poet Ostap Slyvynsky undertook the role of wartime lexicographer, carefully collecting and compiling a dictionary of witness to Russia’s invasion and war against Ukraine. Among the voices represented in A Ukrainian Dictionary of War are those who were forced to leave their homes and venture into the unknown, aid volunteers, medics, soldiers, social activists, and artists. All very different people connected by the experience that war has appeared in their lives.
76. Selected Poems, Oksana Zabuzhko (ENG)
Clytemnestra plotting her husband's murder, Ophelia criticizing her creator, and a report from Chornobyl all offer the poet occasions for reflections marked by a sophisticated wit and a philosophical probing reminiscent of Wislawa Szymborska or Adam Zagajewski. By turns urgent and ironic, Zabuzhko's poetry stands alongside the finest and most important work to emerge from Europe in the last half century.
77. Winter King, Ostap Slyvynsky (ENG)
Ostap Slyvynsky is the poet of everyday things. He writes of children's games, old trees, and family stories. Yet what emerges from under his pen is a portrait of an era. His writing, simultaneously delicate and unflinchingly incisive, like a surgeon's hand, always probes for the bottomless depths gaping behind the mundane. Drawing on three of Slyvynsky's earlier poetry collections, this volume also includes some of his most recent poems.
78. Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine (ENG)
Published in 2017, this anthology documents Russia’s war against Ukraine in its intermediate phase between the start of the war in Donbas and the full-scale invasion, when the world had seemingly forgotten about Ukraine. The anthology brings together some of the most compelling poetic voices from different regions of Ukraine. Young and old, female and male, somber and ironic, tragic and playful, filled with extraordinary terror and ordinary human delights, the voices recreate the human sounds of war in its tragic complexity.
79. The God of Freedom, Yuliya Musakovska (ENG)
In Yuliya Musakovska's newest poetry collection, The God of Freedom, she reveals the landscape of a turbulent, contemporary Ukraine. Equal parts intimate and expansive, the poems follow the societal struggles of women and their families, the trauma of returning soldiers, and the peoples' future under the shadow of war and its tumultuous past. Vibrant, relevant, and masterful, this volume stands out as a must-read work in translation, full of profound insights and captivating eloquence.
80. Nobody Knows Us Here & We Don’t Know Anyone, Kateryna Kalytko (ENG)
Kateryna Kalytko’s sophisticated poetry volume, Nobody Knows Us Here, and We Don’t Know Anyone, deals with separations and changes, hinting at the ongoing war in Ukraine. One can intuit that the characters, succinctly depicted, are Crimean Tatars, Jews, or the displaced citizens of Ukraine, refugees from the occupied territories. However, these departures and partings, acute alienation and pain that permeate the poems, could also be read as elements of a more philosophical and global matrix, relevant to any region and each and every human being. Losses, wars, and abandoned houses in Kalytko’s poetry are elevated to the realm of the universal myth of home and its loss, akin to the banishment from the garden of Eden. Kalytko’s visual images are stunningly detailed, and her poetic language rich and exuberant.
81. Hommage à l'Ukraine (FR)
Like the rest of the world, France began to fully pay attention to Ukraine only after February 24, when names of unknown localities, marked by battles and tragedies – Mariupol, Bucha, Kharkiv, Dnipro – began to appear on the news. This volume emerged from the wish of the French people to know more about Ukraine and Ukrainians. In response, fifteen authors from different parts of the country shared stories about places which symbolize Ukraine for them. This gets the reader acquainted with a prospective country with a centuries-old cultural tradition and abundant literature, still lesser known in France.
82. Ukraine : 24 poètes pour un pays (FR)
This book, like most of foreign-published Ukrainian anthologies, arose from the outbreak of the war in Ukraine. It unites Ukrainian poets who are part of the resistance. Some of them, like Taras Shevchenko, established a national identity against the face of aggression. Others, like Vasyl Stus, writer and dissident, fought against Nazism, Stalinism, and the Cold War. The youngest, like Ella Yevtushenko (the anthology curator), belong to the generation of Dignity, born after the collapse of the USSR, in already independent Ukraine. The spirit of Maidan, the spirit of men and women who want to freely choose their country’s future, resonates in their voices.
83. The Voices of Babyn Yar, Marianna Kiyanovska (ENG, DE)
With The Voices of Babyn Yar—a collection of stirring poems by Marianna Kiyanovska—the award-winning Ukrainian poetess honors the victims of the Holocaust by writing their stories of horror, death, and survival by projecting their own imagined voices. Artful and carefully intoned, the poems convey the experiences of ordinary civilians going through unbearable events leading to the massacre at Kyiv’s Babyn Yar from a first-person perspective to an effect that is simultaneously immersive and estranging. While conceived as a tribute to the fallen, the book raises difficult questions about memory, responsibility, and commemoration of those who had witnessed an evil that verges on the unspeakable.
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE
84. Travelbook. Ukraine (ENG, DE, FR)
Travelbook.Ukraine has 1200 unique facts about Ukraine and Ukrainians. The authors found not only the most amazing, but also the most important things to know about Ukraine: unique places to visit, cultural achievements, outstanding personalities and turning points that influenced the course of history and the life of every Ukrainian. This book was created from discoveries to help people look at Ukraine in a new way.
This edition is not only for adults but also for family reading with children.
85. How War Changed Rondo, Romana Romanyshyn, Andriy Lesiv (ENG, DE, FR)
Danko, Zirka, and Fabian live peacefully in the small town of Rondo, a magical and joyful place where even the flowers sing! Everything is perfect… until the fateful day that War arrives. Having never experienced War, the inhabitants don’t know what to do. They try to talk to it and fight it, but nothing seems to stop the spread of War’s destruction and darkness. Harnessing the power of light, community, and song, Danko, Zirka, and Fabian, along with all their neighbors, must rally together to lead Rondo to victory. This Ukrainian picture book was translated into numerous languages and has won a number of international awards.
86. My Dearest Dido: The Holodomor Story, Marion Mutala (ENG)
This heartbreaking record is based on the voices of survivors and told through a series of letters between Dido Bohdan and his teenage granddaughter Hanusia. The Holodomor, or Great Ukrainian Famine, was a five-year plan engineered by Stalin that starved millions of people. The author deliberately chose this narrative format for young audiences to better understand a hard and complicated historical issue.
87. Maya and Her Friends: A Story About Tolerance and Acceptance to Support the Children of Ukraine, Larysa Denysenko (ENG)
This picture book was first published in Ukraine in 2017 and titled Maya and Her Moms. Its English version, though, was only released in 2023, which also affected positioning: a story about tolerance and equality became a symbolic sign of support for Ukrainian children. The author, Larysa Denysenko, wrote the foreword for it in her apartment hallway while hiding from a Russian missile attack. Despite the new title, the story itself remains positive and interesting.
88. Stars & Poppy Seeds, Romana Romanyshyn, Andriy Lesiv (ENG)
As the daughter of well-known mathematicians, Flora loves to count more than anything in the world. She counts all the things around her—the animals, grains of sand on the beach, and letters in her dad’s newspaper. When Dora looks at the Milky Way, she begins to wonder how to count the mesmerizing number of stars. Is it even possible? Is the night sky so full of stars that even all the numbers she knows would not be enough to count them? Stars & Poppy Seeds is an exquisitely aesthetic work by a world-renowned Ukrainian creative duo.
89. Our World: Ukraine, Kateryna Yehorushkina (ENG)
The Our World series from Barefoot Books is a brilliant option for a young audience to get to know the cultures of different countries. Each book in the series is written by a local author. "Glory to Ukraine!" the Ukrainian writer says, inviting the reader to spend a day with Ukraine, tasting borshch, painting Easter eggs, playing bandura, and even learning some Ukrainian words.
90. A Cool History of Ukraine: From Dinosaurs till Now, Inna Kovalyshena (ENG)
A stunning non-fiction book for curious children who want to know more about Ukraine but never find it in their history textbooks. This beautifully illustrated book takes you on a tour of Ukraine's history, told through the voices of four friends coming from different corners of the country. What kind of dinosaurs lived in Ukraine? Who fought for Ukraine's independence? Why were the Cossacks so glorious? Why do Russians always attack Ukrainians? These are just some of the questions they explore.
91. Letters on the War: Children Write to Soldiers (ENG)
This bright bilingual book includes the letters written by Ukrainian children to soldiers at war. Written in 2015, it remains relevant today, appealing to the values of peace which Ukrainians still have to fight for. The book’s bilingualism can serve as a bridge of understanding between Ukrainian children and their foreign peers in conversations about the war and emotions it brings into the life of everyone who encounters it.
92. Fearless Stories, Kateryna Yegorushkina (ENG)
Welcome to Goriskovy Plavni, a special forest town where the tastiest nuts in the whole world grow. Here, all animals live in peace and harmony. Children have fun and learn, protect each other, test their courage and, most importantly, overcome their fears. Written in a light and easy manner, the book shows how small tricks might just make your big fears disappear forever.
93. Yellow Butterfly: A story from Ukraine, Oleksandr Shatokhin (ENG)
A wordless picture book portrayal of war seen through the eyes of a young girl who finds hope in the symbolism of yellow butterflies against the background of a pure blue sky. Using the colors of his national flag, Oleksandr Shatokhin creates a deeply emotional response to the conflict in Ukraine and provides a narrative full of powerful visual metaphors for readers to consider as they travel from the devastating effects of war to a place of hope for peace and the future.
94. Unconquered. The Big Book Of Bravery (ENG)
Why did Russia attack Ukraine? Who are Ukrainians? Why don’t they want to surrender? What do they learn from war? These questions are answered here in an accessible and humorous manner and illustrated for the convenience of young readers who are already interested in politics. Meanwhile, the story of Ukrainian bravery continues.
95. 36 and 6 Cats, Halyna Vdovychenko (DE)
One rainy evening, 36 cats and 6 kittens – each a bearer of a unique name and vibrant character – stood at the door of Mrs. Krepova’s apartment begging to let them in. The cats turned the life of Mrs. Krepova and her nephew Stas upside down, but in the end, everything worked out well… This is the first book of a bestselling series in contemporary Ukrainian children’s literature.
96. A Small Bunny in the Big City or Honey for Mommy, Ivan Malkovych (ENG)
A touching story with touching illustrations and a happy ending. When Bunny Rabbit’s mommy catches a cold, he sets out to buy her some honey. But it’s a big city, and he is still very small, and he gets lost. What troubles seek after him outside his door? A perfect option for an evening family reading.
97. Guinea Pig Investigates, Ivan Andrusiak (ENG)
Meet Gerard, the guinea pig detective. Whenever there’s a crime in town, all the pets and street animals can rely on him. He is known, however, to have a very sweet tooth, and only investigates a case when given a delicious treat. Together with Gerard, find out who snatched the cat’s breakfast, investigate the darkest streets in town, and discover the identity of the mysterious monster who scares all the pets…
98. Marvelous Monster, Sashko Dermanskyi (ENG)
"Marvelous Monster" is the first book in the Marvelous Monster trilogy by one of the most beloved contemporary Ukrainian children's writers Sashko Dermanskyi. A pink monster named Mo and an ordinary girl Sonia become friends. Beautifully illustrated by Daryna Kaminska, the book is full of magic, humor, adventures, and unexpected plot twists that will surely keep the reader’s attention.
99. Cappy and the Whale, Kateryna Babkina (ENG)
When eight-year-old Cappy discovers a whale swimming outside of his bedroom window, it's fair to say he's quite surprised. Given how long he's spent in hospital, Cappy has had plenty of time to read a LOT of books on animals, and he's never heard of a whale that can fly. Soon, Cappy and the whale are the best of friends, and together they will go on an amazing journey of imagination, hope, and curiosity on the way to Cappy’s recovery from leukemia. Cappy and the Whale is known as a very mature children’s book, but in the first place, it tells about friendship and hope which cancer patients are always in dire need of.
100. The Bison Is Looking For a Nest, Oksana Bula (FR, DE)
Two fairy tales take place in the woods: one of a bear who wants to experience winter and refuses to hibernate and another of a bison who wants to sleep all the cold season long, though his species usually never goes dormant. These opposing views of sleep and rest provoke thoughts and discussions. The book also offers a game approach to sleep appreciated by both children and their parents.
Author: Yuliia Kolisnyk, Sensor Media
Translator: Anna Vovchenko, PEN Ukraine
Copy editor: Christopher Atwood"
Enjoy your reading!
