Chytomo Media and Vivat Publishing announce the launch of the book “Words and Bullets”

“Words and Bullets,” a collection of interviews that originally began as a media series on Chytomo, is set to be published by Vivat Publishing (Kharkiv). This edition will showcase interviews with Ukrainian writers and journalists who have become soldiers and volunteers. The book will be available in Ukrainian on June 14, 2024, and the publisher has announced a pre-order (Ukrainian edition).

Natalya Korniyenko is curating the series. The book will include 24 conversations with a foreword “Just as We Were. Completely Different” by Serhiy Zhadan.

Nearly two dozen interviews were published on the “Chytomo” website between June 2022 and May 2023. The interviewees included Artem Chapeye, Halyna Kruk, Andriy Lyubka, Tetyana Ogarkova, Volodymyr Yermolenko, Bogdan Kolomiychuk, Yaryna Chornohuz, and others. Five more exclusive interviews – with Pavlo Vyshebaba, Dmytro Lazutkin, Lesia Hanzha, Fedir Shandor, and Oleksandr Mykhed – were recorded specifically for the book.

These interviewees have been shaping the Ukrainian literary process and advancing Ukrainian journalism for years, and now they have transformed from narrators into story subjects – those who safeguard our present and make Ukraine’s future possible.

Many Ukrainian writers admitted that in the first days of the full-scale invasion they were completely disappointed in things they had been doing before. All of a sudden, they realized that in front of the echelons of Russian troops and the whistle of their missiles language became powerless. It took them weeks, even months, to rediscover language, regain their ability to write, and finally put the reality into words,

says Natalya Korniyenko, project coordinator and interviewer.

According to Korniyenko, conversations have been recorded under different circumstances. Some authors found the time to communicate directly from the trenches; others had to reschedule the call several times between their missions. Some were injured between the text was being recorded and published. Two of the interviewees in the book, the writer Victoria Amelina and poet Maksym Kryvtsov, died due to the Russian aggression.

Never before have we been so close to death and in so much pain. We have never faced such concentrated evil before. Now, we have it in our lives, now we have seen it all. This is the main alteration that has happened to us and is shaping us. We can try to talk about it. The most important thing is to find the right words, and a worthy interlocutor,

Serhiy Zhadan noted.