Main content

Lyuba Yakimchuk-Ruination of Cities & Words

Episode 3 of 5

Lyuba Yakimchuk grew up near Luhansk in the 1990s. Hybrid war forced her to move to Kyiv. Now war has blown her and her family to Vienna, from where she relates her experience.

A week of Essays from Ukrainian poets who have responded to war in their country since 2014.
Lyuba Yakimchuk is a poet, screenwriter, playwright. She grew up in Eastern Ukraine in the 1990s and witnessed the arrival of hybrid war there as Russian backed separatists began an ongoing bloody conflict with the Ukrainian army. She left for the security of Kyiv but now total war and invasion has uprooted her and her family to Vienna. Recently she wrote 'Before the war I was a good girl, the kind who would never say bad words, who was never rude to anyone, even in the most conflicted situations. 鈥淕ood鈥 in the patriarchal sense of the word, a girl one might imagine growing up in a small town near Luhansk. Yet when the war between Russia and Ukraine began, quite literally in our backyard, back in 2014, I started using filthy language even in my poems, because that very filth was as efficient as a gunshot 鈥 it had the capacity to 鈥渒ill鈥. She recently performed her work at the Grammies. Here she relates her own recent experience of the war and the difficulty of finding words in conflict. as well as reading poems such as 'He Says Everything Will Be Fine' and 'Crow, Wheels'... 'When the city was destroyed, they started fighting over the cemetery.'

Producer - Mark Burman

For more information on Lyuba Yakimchuk and the work of other Ukrainian war poets go to https://www.wordsforwar.com/

Available now

14 minutes

Broadcast

  • Wed 20 Apr 2022 22:45

Death in Trieste

Death in Trieste

A 1760s murder still informs ideas about aesthetics, a certain sort of sex, and death.

Watch: My Deaf World

Watch: My Deaf World

Five compelling experiences of what it is like to be deaf in 21st-century Britain.

The Book that Changed Me

Five figures from the arts and science introduce books that changed their lives and work.

Download The Essay

Download The Essay

Download all the episodes from the series and listen at your leisure.

Podcast