INDEX at Book Arsenal: talks about home, war and the art of writing

The Head of INDEX, Sasha Dovzhyk, took part in several discussion panels. On 29 May, Sasha, along with three Fellows of the Victoria Amelina Programme at INDEX — Anna Gruver (Her Empty Places, Real Estate), Lucy Fulford (The Exiled), and Kateryna Iakovlenko (Donbas as a Metaphor) — held a discussion titled ‘Documentary Writing and Memory: The Victoria Amelina Programme.’ The conversation focused on the specific challenges of documenting an ongoing war and the ways writers engage with the themes of place, landscape, and home. The discussion also touched on the themes of memory and the influence of Victoria Amelina’s work on documentary literature.

I am very happy that we speakers, who are so different in some ways yet so close because we are all searching for answers (what is home, what it could and could no longer be), met during this year’s Book Arsenal to talk about it under the auspices of the Victoria Amelina Fellowship at INDEX.
Anna Gruver, a 2026 Victoria Amelina Fellow at INDEX, who is working on a collection of poetic essays, Invisible Home, dedicated to Victoria

International Victoria Amelina Fellow 2026, Lucy Fulford, was surprised to see so many people coming to listen to the talks and celebrate literature, which felt like an act of resistance amid heightened Russian threats.

I feel a huge amount of responsibility on a fellowship named after someone, to continue the spirit of their work. It was a deeply personal discussion, with reflections around home and belonging, as well as the war and its losses.
Lucy Fulford, a 2026 Victoria Amelina Fellow at INDEX, who is currently working on a topic of displacement in Ukraine

As the discussion focused heavily on the concept of home, Lucy, whose grandparents were expelled from Uganda, shared her thoughts on displacement in Ukraine.

I spoke about my work documenting displacement within Ukraine’s borders, as well as my previous work covering forced displacement from Uganda, and how important it is in today’s anti-immigration landscape to highlight the fact that most people who are displaced by crises do not cross borders or move to neighbouring countries.

On 30 May, alongside authors Yaryna Grusha and Anna Koriagina, and moderated by Tetyana Teren, Sasha Dovzhyk took part in a discussion titled ‘Writing, scrivere, écrire about Ukraine. The experience of Ukrainian authors writing in foreign languages.’

Sasha Dovzhyk spoke about her creative nonfiction book Apocalypse Baroque: Tales from Ukraine at War (forthcoming with Extraordinary Books, September 2026), which reimagines Ukrainian testimonies as fairy tales.

Photo: Valeriya Mezentseva

This year’s Book Arsenal also included INDEX community events, where our first Veteran Programme Fellow, Yevhen Shybalov, presented his debut novel, Hra Chysel (A Game of Numbers), which can now be purchased from the Ukrainian publishing house Bilka.

Victoria Amelina Fellow 2025, writer Kateryna Iakovlenko, also had the chance to moderate a conversation with Pascal Gielen and Natasha Chichasova on the culture of mistrust.

Photo: Valeriya Landar | Anastasiia Baklazhko