Charlotte Higgins

Time was meaningless.

Everyone was living in this sort of present moment.

Language felt like it's...

It didn't hold form anymore.

So poetry is a space where you can do something with that.

There's a volume of poetry, Annie, for instance, called We Were Here by a young poet called Arthur Dron, who's in his 20s and was in the army for three years.

He was actually very badly injured and is now a veteran.

He's not in the armed forces anymore.

But his poems are really surprising if you're expecting...

anything full of machismo and ardent, furious patriotism and loathing of the enemy.

His poems are beautiful, tender, tiny memorials for people he fought with and who he lost.

And so the Ukrainian army is made up of Ukrainian citizens.

That means that there are a lot of Ukrainian artists and writers and creative people in the army.

So it was incredibly bleak in many ways.

So many young talents are being killed on the front lines.

And there are a fair few talents being killed as civilians behind the lines as well.

I met Victoria Amelina in October 2022.

She was an extremely articulate advocate for Ukraine abroad.

And she was a very significant artist in Ukraine.

So her novels were very popular.