An anthology with Iryna Tsilyk’s text has been published in Norway

“Our Whispers and Screams”, a digital literary anthology, with a text of the same name written by Iryna Tsilyk, Ukrainian writer, director and poet, has been published in Norway.

Essay’s topic is “freedom of writing.”

“I wrote a text about my colleagues. Those who are behind me and those who are next to me, those who are too busy fighting for Ukraine’s survival to write the way they used to, and those who will never write anything again. In that text I wrote about many things and many people. … I wrote about everything unspoken, hidden because of security measures, about the severe dumbness of my many predecessors. I wrote about the many synonyms for the word “longing” there are in Ukrainian and how much I was pissed off by the Ukrainian literature at school, until I started discovering the world of all these writers, until I learned that they were the fans of black humor too, made love, and burned with passion and pain. They also had the courage to write about important things, and for that they were ground down by the dark times. I wrote a bit about our 1920s and 30s, 1960s and 80s, and people who became their voices. I also wrote about our present, about my friendfeed, which often looks like an obituary feed, about my generation, whose youth, resources, strength and sometimes even lives are being devoured by war,” she wrote on her FB page.

Iryna Tsilyk added that her text was also about Victoria Amelina and how she was murdered by Russians and Volodymyr Vakulenko’s diary.

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The anthology is united by the theme of freedom of speech. It was published by the Litteraturhuset Foundation. The editor of the texts is Daniel Röckhol.

In addition to Iryna Tsilyk’s, the anthology includes texts by Joyce Carol Oates (USA), Maneo Mohale (South Africa), Fatemeh Ehtesari (Iran), Ahmet Altan (Turkey), Torvald Stin (Norway).

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You can read the anthology here.

Main image: litteraturhuset.no