by Kate Tsurkan

When the full-scale invasion began, Andriy Lyubka struggled to write. A celebrated Ukrainian writer and translator, he turned instead to fundraising, logistics, and delivering used cars to the front for soldiers’ needs.

Yet somewhere between non-stop volunteer work and battling with exhaustion that comes from it, he began to see that even literature — words, sentences, imagination — could also serve Ukraine’s cause, albeit in a less immediate way.

His volunteer work led him to write a book of anecdotal essays titled “War from the Rear,” in which he reflects on volunteering, the unexpected help he has gotten from people along the way, and how the full-scale war changed his outlook on life. The book will be released in English translation by Academic Studies Press this November. Kate Tsurkan, who conducted this interview, was involved in the English translation.

His debut novel, “Carbide,” about a drunken history teacher who naively enlists the help of local criminals to dig a tunnel into the European Union and smuggle all 40 million-plus Ukrainian population into Europe, was published by Jantar in English translation in 2019.

Now, with the recent release in Ukraine of his first novel since the start of the all-out war, Lyubka reclaims the act of storytelling not as escape, but as strategy.

Read more: KYIV INDEPENDENT