Ukrainian Wartime Poetry: Voices from an Endangered Culture

A renaissance of poetry is happening in Ukraine now, as soldiers and civilians seek both to process trauma and to give voice to their cultural and linguistic identity in defiance of Russia's invasion that seeks to eradicate them. This phenomenon presents an opportunity to set an agenda for fundamental research into the role of poetry as a cultural force in hybrid warfare and explore a crucial challenge to the conduct of research in complex circumstances. This project will investigate wartime poetry as a means of psychological resilience and cultural resistance. Research and poetry are integrated in our approach, which emerges from public engagement events in summers 2023 and 2024 with the poets and PEN Ukraine representatives Olena Huseinova and Yuliya Musakovska, leading to some of the first translations into English of Ukrainian wartime poetry written since the start of the full-scale invasion. The project will bring together leading international specialists in Ukrainian Studies from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including social anthropology, cultural studies, literary criticism, and translation studies, to achieve our first objective, a co-authored volume on Ukrainian wartime poetry. Our book will analyse the poetics of war, the evolution of literary responses to trauma, and the intersection of poetic form with national identity under existential threat. We will hold monthly publication workshops on Zoom to present work in progress and collaboratively refine research questions and interdisciplinary methods. The second objective is the production of an anthology of Ukrainian wartime poetry in English translation. This book will become a key reference point for future research in this area, as comparatively little Ukrainian wartime poetry has been translated into English since 2022. It will relate the war since the start of the full-scale invasion through work by 20 poets, approximately half of whom wrote while on active service. To achieve an overarching aim of raising awareness of the poetry we will run a series of at least three major public engagement events, to showcase the anthology-in-development as well as the wider research, through poetry performance and discussion. We will work with established project partners in the UNESCO Cities of Literature network, including Exeter, Lviv, and Manchester Cities of Literature, and the Ukrainian Institute London, to reach a wide audience, and engage the public in UK, Ukraine and beyond throughout the project via mainstream and social media promotion. The Project Lead, Hugh Roberts, is bringing research methods of literary analysis and scholarly editing within French Studies to this evolving phenomenon. He will co-edit the core volume with Iryna Starovoyt, a leading figure in Ukrainian Cultural Studies and a highly regarded poet. The translated anthology will be produced with independent publisher Jantar and edited by leading Ukrainian poets and cultural advocates with the Project Lead, who will also coordinate translation by three prize-winning literary translators from Ukrainian. Co-creation of research and impact for this project is both a methodological necessity and an imperative in solidarity, thus, excluding the PL, all core team members are Ukrainian and wholly or partly based in Ukraine. Completed pilot work on raising awareness of Ukrainian poetry in the UK attests to the visceral emotional power of the work and the key relations to the cultural context of production. The proposed project now affords the opportunity to take this initiative to a new level of research and impact.