Fighting forgottenness—stories of hope and resilience

Tanja Maljartschuk is a Ukrainian writer and essayist based in Vienna. She has published several short story collections and novels, including A Biography of a Chance Miracle and Forgottenness (widely translated), the children's book Mox Nox, and the German-language essay collection Gleich geht die Geschichte weiter, wir atmen nur aus. She has received several awards, among them the BBC Book of the Year (Ukraine, 2016), the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize (2018) and the Usedom Literature Prize (2022). The English edition of Forgottenness was shortlisted for the EBRD Prize in 2025.

Elif Shafak is an award-winning British Turkish novelist, whose work has been translated into 58 languages. The author of 20 books, 13 of which are novels, she is a bestselling author in many countries around the world. Shafak’s novel 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the RSL Ondaatje Prize. The Island of Missing Trees was a Sunday Times bestseller, and was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and the Women’s Prize for Fiction. There are Rivers in the Sky, which won an Edward Stanford Award for Fiction, is her latest novel.

Hisham Matarwas born in New York to Libyan parents, spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo and has lived most of his life in London. His memoir The Return received a Pulitzer Prize in 2017. He is also the aut

Olesya Khromeychukis a historian and writer. She is the author of The Death of a Soldier Told by His Sister (2022) and Undetermined Ukrainians (2013). Khromeychuk has written for The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, Prospect and The New Statesman, and has delivered a TED talk on ‘What the World Can Learn From Ukraine's Fight for Democracy’. She has taught the history of East-Central Europe at several British universities and is currently the Director of the Ukrainian Institute London.