This is a past event
Professor Karin Friedrich, Chair in Early Modern History, shall lead the following discussion at the WayWORD Festival on Thursday 26th September 2024.
Aleksandra Hnatiuk & Jen Stout: Women on War
Journalist Jen Stout’s Night Train to Odesa charts her time in war-torn Ukraine while Aleksandra Hnatiuk has written on Ukrainian women’s courage in World War II and Ukraine’s struggles for independence and identity. Come along to hear them talk women in war zones, cultural identities, unearthing truths and battling falsifications of history, chaired by Karin Friedrich.
Aleksandra Hnatiuk is a Polish and Ukrainian scholar, professor at the University of Warsaw and Kyiv Mohyla Academy, translator, diplomat, and civic activist. Vice-president of Ukrainian PEN, defending writers and freedom of expression (2018-2022), her work has been located in the borderlands between the disciplines of history, the history of ideas, philology, literary studies, cultural studies, and the sociology of culture. She has been editor-in-chief since 2017 of the project Ukraine, Europe 1921–1939, the aim of which is to publish little-known documents that counteract falsifications of history, which are still prevalent in eastern Europe. Her publications and prizes include Courage and Fear (2020), a study of Lviv/Lwów under Soviet and Nazi occupation, 1939–1945, Farewell to Empire: Ukrainian Debates on Identity (2003), Pruszyński Prize (Poland, 2018), Antonovych Prize (USA, 2010), and Knight’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta (2012), for public service and contributions to Polish-Ukrainian dialogue.
Jen Stout is a Scottish freelance journalist who has covered the war in Ukraine for major outlets including BBC radio, London Review of Books, Prospect, and the Sunday Post. Previously she had jobs in TV and radio with the BBC and was a local newspaper reporter. Her work in Ukraine has been shortlisted for prizes by Amnesty International, the Foreign Press Association and the Scottish Press Awards, among others. In 2023 she won a Travelling Scholarship from the Society of Authors, and a Rory Peck Trust bursary in 2022. Jen's book about covering the war in Ukraine, Night Train to Odesa, was published in May 2024 and has been serialised on Radio 4.
Night Train to Odesa: Covering the Human Cost of Russia’s War
When Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, millions of lives changed in an instant. Millions of people were suddenly on the move. In this great flow of people was a reporter from the north of Scotland. Jen Stout left Moscow abruptly, ending up on a border post in southeast Romania, from where she began to cover the human cost of Russian aggression. Her first-hand, vivid reporting brought the war home to readers in Scotland as she reported from front lines and cities across Ukraine. Stories from the night trains, birthday parties, military hospitals and bunkers: stories from the ground, from a writer with a deep sense of empathy, always seeking to understand the bigger picture, the big questions of identity, history, hopes and fears in this war in Europe. Night Train to Odesa begins in Russia and continues to focus on people, relationships and individuals in Ukraine. Accessible and highly readable in both its language and its themes, this is the account of a young female reporter with no institutional backup or security telling us what she sees in the twenty-first century’s shocking European war-zone.
In partnership with The Centre for Polish-Lithuanian Studies at The University of Aberdeen.