Dr. Sasha Dovzhyk, a Ukrainian writer, journalist and founder of Index: Institute for Documentation and Exchange, has compiled a list of ten essential Ukrainian books available in English—ranging from fin-de-siècle feminist drama to poetry written in frontline trenches.

Dovzhyk, whose own book Apocalypse Baroque: Tales from Ukraine at War will be published in the UK on 24 September, presented the list following her participation in Lviv BookForum, held 11–13 September 2026 in its fifth year of digital partnership with Hay Festival Global. The three-day hybrid programme brought together writers from across the world for conversations on memory, displacement and grief; events remain free to watch on Hay Festival Anytime.

The list arrives under grim circumstances. Dovzhyk compiled it, she writes, when Russia targeted Ukrainian publishing infrastructure with missiles and destroyed more than 13 million books in a month—a third of the country's annual print run. "In this light, it is time to consider carefully why Ukrainian letters pose such a threat to the Russian regime."

The selections span a century of literary practice: canonical authors silenced by the Russian empire, a novelist killed by a Russian missile, and contemporary writers who have enlisted in the armed forces.

Lesia Ukrainka, Cassandra (HURI Books, 2024), translated by Nina Murray. Ukrainka, a turn-of-the-century writer, tackled key themes of the western canon from a feminist and anti-colonial perspective. Her choice to write in Ukrainian—a language persecuted by the Russian empire—denied her representation in the world republic of letters for decades. Murray's fresh translation of the poetic drama revisits the Trojan war myth through a woman cursed to know the truth but never be believed.

Victoria Amelina, Looking at Women Looking at War (HarperCollins, 2025). A novelist turned war crimes researcher, Amelina photographed bomb craters in children's playgrounds and recorded survivors' testimonies alongside women she called her sisters: lawyers, soldiers, journalists, museum workers. She was killed by a Russian missile strike in 2023, two-thirds through her manuscript. Assembled by friends and family, the book's forced silences and empty pages become, in Dovzhyk's reading, "its own form of testimony: a verdict for Amelina's killers, and eternity for her voice." The book received the George Orwell Prize for Political Writing and the Moore Prize for Human Rights Writing.

Maik Yohansen, Dr. Leonardo's Journey to Sloboda Switzerland with His Future Lover, the Beautiful Alcesta, translated by Uilleam Blacker (HURI Books, 2026). Yohansen belonged to Ukraine's Executed Renaissance, the generation purged by the Soviet regime in the early 1930s; he was arrested and executed in 1937 alongside thousands of Ukrainian intellectuals. In his playful modernist novel about an Italian doctor travelling through northeastern Ukraine, the landscape is the true protagonist. The book reads poignantly today, Dovzhyk notes, when those same lands are mined and mutilated by Russia's military aggression.

Olena Stiazhkina, Cecil the Lion Had to Die (HURI Books, 2024), translated by Dominique Hoffman. Stiazhkina, a writer and professor of history at Donetsk National University, fled Russian occupation of her city in 2014; she received the Vasyl Stus Prize in 2026. Her novel alternates between Russian and Ukrainian, reflecting the linguistic flexibility of eastern Ukrainian society, and challenges the stereotypical image of the east as a monochrome industrial territory. Instead it evokes a complex multi-ethnic history—Greeks from Crimea, German settlers, Belgian and Welsh capitalists—long before Soviet industrialisation entailed mass displacement.

Kateryna Zarembo, Ukrainian Sunrise: Stories of the Donetsk and Luhansk Regions from the Early 2000s, translated by Tetiana Savchynska (ASP, 2024). Zarembo, a mother of four with a PhD in Political Science, traces how Soviet power sought to erase the Ukrainian and European past of the Donbas, and recovers the patriotic communities, writers and football ultras who kept Ukrainian identity alive from the early 2000s to 2014. She finished the book, joined the volunteer Hospitallers battalion as a combat medic, then enlisted in the Armed Forces.

Yuri Andrukhovych, The Moscoviad, translated by Vitaly Chernetsky. Written in 1993 and set in 1991, the novel views Moscow from a colonised subject rather than the usual Russian lens or fascinated outsider's gaze. It follows a Ukrainian poet haunted by KGB officers inside the literary dormitory of Moscow State University as the empire disintegrates around him—in plot, in fragmented form, and in language itself, as Ukrainian, Russian, German and obscenity intermingle.

Serhiy Zhadan, Voroshilovgrad (Deep Vellum, 2016), translated by Isaac Wheeler and Reilly Costigan-Humes. Zhadan's 2010 novel is set in a city renamed four times in the twentieth century yet alive in its characters' intimate memories. Its hero Herman, an uprooted loser of the post-Soviet generation, returns home to piece together a minefield of traumatic memory. Written years before the war, the novel reads as prophetic: it brims with violence, military outfits and men defending their territory against invaders. Luhansk/Voroshilovgrad has been occupied by Russia since 2014.

Artem Chapeye, Ordinary People Don't Carry Machine Guns, translated by Zenia Tompkins. Chapeye, a self-described pacifist and prominent male feminist, enlisted the day after 24 February 2022. His memoir documents the first three years of full-scale invasion; throughout, Russia and the fear, grief and guilt it brings is named simply "gloom." The book does not shy away from the contradictions of a progressive left-wing intellectual forced to defend his society with arms.

Artur Dron, We Were Here (Jantar, 2024), translated by Yuliya Musakovska. Dron, twenty-four, has served on the frontline since 2022, and wrote much of the collection there. Unlike a novel, Dovzhyk observes, a poem can be written in a trench or passed in whispers between communities of resistance. Illustrated with children's drawings sent to soldiers—which, Dron writes, gave the fighters strength to keep going—the collection asks why poetry matters in wartime. Its answer is the book itself, which testifies, as one poem puts it, that Ukrainian literature 'now contains more' of the silence between words than the words.

Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (2021). Plokhy, perhaps the most prominent and prolific historian of Ukraine, guides readers through the country's past at the crossroads of empires—Roman and Ottoman, Third Reich and Soviet—telling its history through the figures who tried to claim or resist it, from Vikings and Cossacks to the architects of modern Ukrainian national identity.

Dovzhyk frames the list as an act of restoration. "Reading these books," she writes, "is a form of restoring justice for a nation which has so long fought for the right to narrate its stories on its own terms." With Apocalypse Baroque arriving in UK bookshops on 24 September, her own contribution to that narration is imminent.