The Essay: Words for War

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The Essay: Words for War: Lyuba Yakimchuk-Ruination of Cities & Words

Lyuba Yakimchuk-Ruination of Cities & Words

Words for War

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Lyuba Yakimchuk was born in eastern Ukraine near Luhansk and has now fled Kyiv for Vienna.

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. “Good” 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 – it had the capacity to “kill”. 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/

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Hybrid war came to Ukraine in 2014. Its poets have been responding to it ever since.

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