Air-raid alerts and frontline memoirs: Kyiv hosts literary festival amid war

<p>Visitors flock to Book Arsenal in Ukraine’s capital as wartime writing takes centre stage</p><p>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.</p><p>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 <em>passeggiata</em> through its venue, the city’s vast 18th-century military arsenal.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/07/kyiv-hosts-literary-festival-amid-ukraine-war-book-arsenal">Continue reading...</a>