Scholar in Residence 2025

INDEX - Spring 2025 15 April – 15 June 2025

Charlotte Higgins is a British author, journalist, and chief culture writer at The Guardian.

Her residency project is a book with the working title Ukrainian Lessons — a work by a non-Ukrainian seeking to understand and shed light on current events through the lens of culture, while literally taking Ukrainian language lessons and drawing broader conclusions from Ukraine’s experience.

Ukrainian Lessons (working title) is a book about what I have learned from reporting on Russia’s war in Ukraine. I first went to Ukraine in 2022 not as a war reporter, nor as a foreign correspondent, but as a writer on the arts. Over many subsequent reporting trips the work took me from Lviv in the west, Kyiv in the centre, Odesa in the south, and to Kharkiv and parts of the Donetsk region in the east. I was charting the role of culture in Ukraine’s resistance to the full-scale invasion. An energetic, highly motivated cacophony of writers, poets, filmmakers, playwrights and artists was documenting the war. The argument of this book is that the literature and art made by these people, some of whom have lost their lives, will shape its memory. They have been working in ways that are subtle and tender, edging beyond “official” points of view and staking out the fragile, difficult territory of the emotions. They have found the language, whether verbal or visual, to say the unsayable.

Charlotte Higgins

Charlotte Higgins is the chief culture writer of the Guardian, writing on the arts in many forms, including for the “long read”, Opinion, and culture sections.

Since 2022, much of her focus has been reporting on Russia’s war in Ukraine, using culture as a lens. As an author, most of her books touch on the classics. Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain, about Britain’s 400-year period under Roman rule, was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson (now Baillie Gifford) prize, among other awards, and has been adapted into a play by David Greig.

Her latest, Greek Myths, was shortlisted for the Waterstones book of the year 2021. In naming her one of 10 extraordinary British women writers working today, novelist Elif Shafak wrote:

“Charlotte Higgins is an author with magic in her pen. From ancient subjects she conjures living text: vast conversations about who we are today and why the stories we tell really matter.”

Born in the Potteries, in the English Midlands, Charlotte is a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, a past winner of the Classical Association prize and and a trustee of the British School at Rome. With Professor Mary Beard, she is co-host of the podcast Instant Classics.