Writing War and Trauma with Yuliya Musakovska and Maria Tumarkin

How can we speak and write about war? What role does silence play in this process? What does it mean for people and places to survive war? We discussed these questions and more with two brilliant writers, Maria Tumarkin and Yuliya Musakovska, whose works have interrogated war and trauma in uncompromisingly honest and perceptive ways. This episode of The Ukraine Shelf was recorded in front of a live audience at Dim Zvuku in Lviv in collaboration with the INDEX Institute for Documentation and Exchange.

Our guests:

• Yuliya Musakovska is a multi-award-winning poet and translator from Lviv. She has published six volumes of poetry in Ukrainian and has written for many magazines and journals in Ukraine and internationally. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. Her first collection in English translation, The God of Freedom, was published in 2024 by Arrowsmith Press and translated by Olena Jennings with the author. You can read Yuliya’s poetry in English translation here, here, and here.
• Maria Tumarkin is a Ukrainian-Jewish-Australian writer, essayist, and lecturer at the School of Culture and Communication at Melbourne University. She is originally from Kharkiv. Maria has written four books that blend essay, memoir, cultural history and philosophy, often focusing on the ways in which the past, as she puts it, ‘infiltrates’ the present. As well as books, she writes essays, reviews, and pieces for performance and radio.

Books discussed:

• Maria Tumarkin, Axiomatic (Fitzcarraldo, 2018) and Traumascapes: The Power and Fate of Places Transformed by Tragedy (Melbourne University Press, 2005)
• Yuliya Musakovska, The God of Freedom, transl. by Olena Jennings with Yuliya Musakovska (Arrowsmith, 2024) Recommendations
• Artur Dron’, We Were Here, transl. Yuliya Musakovska (Jantar, 2024)
• Elina Softić, Sarajevo Days, Sarajevo Nights, transl. Nina Conić (Ruminator, 1996)
• Semezdin Mehmedinović, Sarajevo Blues, transl. Ammiel Alcalay (City Lights, 2021)
• Miljenko Jergović, Sarajevo Marlboro, transl. Stela Tomassević (Archipelago, 2003)