Three Ukrainian Voices Redefine the Literature of War

Artur Dron's essay collection "Hemingway Knows Nothing" won PEN Ukraine's Yury Shevelyov Prize for nonfiction in 2025, and Lena Lyagushonkova's autofiction "A Cat Peed on My Flag" took the BBC Ukraine Book of the Year Award in fiction that same year.

The pair anchor a small but concentrated wave of autobiographical Ukrainian prose about the full-scale Russian invasion, joined by Andriy Lyubka's "War From the Rear: A Ukrainian Aid Volunteer's Story," already available in English from Academic Studies Press.

What is each book actually about?

• Dron enlisted as a poet in his early twenties. "Hemingway Knows Nothing," forthcoming in English from Jantar Publishers in the UK, gathers essays on life at point zero: being wounded, losing friends, negotiating faith.

• Lyubka, who joined the Armed Forces after publication, leads a volunteer team that has procured more than four hundred used vehicles for the Ukrainian frontline since 2022.

• Lyagushonkova's novel is set in Luhansk in the 1990s and early 2000s — the "terra incognita" of independent Ukraine. No English edition has been announced.

Why polemicize Hemingway?

The question haunting Ukrainian literary circles after 24 February 2022 was direct: "Who will be our Hemingway and write this war?" Dron's title is his answer.

The Hemingway–Remarque tradition treats war as foreign adventure or forced obligation. Dron rejects both frames. "For Ukrainians of today," he writes, "war is neither an adventure nor a political game where they are someone's pawns." It is, in his telling, a conscious defense of land, autonomy, and belief.

The caveat: the same epistemic claim echoes across Dron's essays and risks flattening differences among Ukraine's own diverse wartime experience. Whether the polemic ages depends on how widely readers outside Ukraine accept the framing.

What does the rear look like?

Lyubka calls his terrain "the war from the rear" — not the soldier's war but the volunteers' and the families'. His team raises money, buys vehicles, drives them east. The essays dwell on details: a cup of coffee at a roadside station in the eastern oblasts, the soldier who dies before the car arrives, the guilt that follows.

Lyubka's prose runs lyrical, sometimes humorous, often grieving. Critics have placed the technique somewhere between reportage and memoir. That label is generous; the book is at heart a road log under bombardment.

What cannot be translated?

Lyagushonkova's Luhansk survives in a particular sociolect: literary Ukrainian mixed with surzhyk — a Ukrainian-Russian creole — alongside Luhansk miners' slang and culture-specific profanity. The vocabulary does more than flavor the prose. It carries Soviet-era epistemic violence rooted in gender and class.

Critics have called the novel postcolonial and feminist. It also reads like a stand-up routine of dark humor aimed at a region the war made legible to the rest of Ukraine. The caveat: those critical labels can be shortcuts around the harder craft question — how any of this survives an English translation that strips the lexical texture.

What does this change for English-language readers?

Access, mostly. Lyubka's book, translated by Kate Tsurkan, sits on shelves now. Dron's English edition is "shortly" out, per the publisher. Lyagushonkova's remains a translation gamble, with no Western edition confirmed.

Two national prizes and a BBC Ukraine award inside a single calendar year (2025) suggest publishers betting on Ukrainian war writing are not acting alone. Whether the English-language market receives these books as reportage, as testimony, or as literature is a question the next two seasons of reviews will answer.