Iryna Shuvalova at DayBreak café in Taipei in January 2025 giving a reading of her poetry alongside her translator Hsu Yu-Hsuan. Photo by Filip Noubel, used with permission.

War often reduces entire cultures and countries to one over-simplified narrative, particularly in the domain of news. Ukraine was first invaded by Russia in 2014, and then again in 2022, and that story dominates the vast majority of media coverage on Ukraine, given the extent of death and destruction, but also the resistance demonstrated by the Ukrainian people. But Ukraine is also home to its own multilingual and multiethnic literature, music, and art that cannot ignore war but is more than war.

To unpack this paradox, Global Voices spoke to Iryna Shuvalova, a poet, scholar, and translator from Kyiv who now lives mostly in Oslo. She is the author of award-winning books of poetry in Ukrainian, including “stoneorcharwoods” and “endsongs.” Her work has been translated into 32 languages. The interview took place over email after an in-person meeting in Taipei. Answers have been edited for style and brevity.

Portrait of Iryna Shuvalova by Anton Bystriakov for Craft Magazine, photo used with permission.

Filip Noubel (FN): As a poet, how do you navigate your creative space between the war in Ukraine and the freedom of literature to find inspiration anywhere?  

Iryna Shuvalova (IS):  I remember how, during a poetry reading in Italy, one of the audience members asked me: ‘And what else do Ukrainian poets write about? Besides war.’ In a way, this was an understandable question. War has necessarily become a crucial subject for Ukrainian writers: after the current war’s outbreak in 2014 and then after Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion. It’s impossible not to write about something that shakes your world upside down so completely.

We, poets, also understood well the importance of literature as an element of wartime cultural diplomacy, as a way to speak to the world about our country’s plight. At the same time, Ukrainian poets invited to speak and read their work outside Ukraine are largely expected to speak and read on the subject of the war — not on other things, even while Ukrainian poetry is, of course, not limited to war writing.

My 2024 book ‘endsongs,’ which explores the experience of loss, includes many war poems. However, I am equally interested in growing up and aging as the loss of our past selves or in displacement and relocation as a type of loss.” Yet all these things tend to be of lesser interest to publishers and festival organizers abroad, who sometimes, sadly, expect me to perform my wartime Ukrainian identity in a rather limited and predictable way.

There is a certain paradox in this, because readers eventually get tired of coming into contact with war-themed Ukrainian material only. War fatigue is a real thing. So we want to show our readers abroad how much more Ukrainian literature has to offer, how witty, complex, and rich in good stories it can be. The war marks our writing, but it does not define it.

FN: One of your many projects focused on war songs in Donbas after the first 2014 invasion of Ukraine. What surprised you the most in this project? 

IS: Yes, besides being a writer and translator, I am also a scholar of Ukraine and Eastern Europe, currently in a postdoctoral position at the University of Oslo. As a researcher, I’m interested in how popular culture and politics intersect. The project you’ve mentioned was my PhD research, which I started in 2016. At that point, pre-2022, there was already a powerful cultural response to the war, which was then still centered in the region of Donbas but affected people all over Ukraine. The conflict continued to claim lives for all the eight years it burned, then simmered before erupting into yet another bloody explosion with the full-scale invasion.

I was especially interested in how popular music reflected people’s wartime attitudes and experiences. Unlike the so-called ‘high’ culture, popular culture is something that people find easy to access, consume, and even create, particularly in the age of social media. Not everyone is going to read a big fat novel on the subject of the war. Meanwhile, a pop song can be listened to in three minutes. Its music and lyrics tend to be accessible. On YouTube, a war song gone viral can collect millions of views. Popular songs offer unique insights into the rapidly evolving landscape of the war and the community’s response to it.

What surprised me was how many people, even inside the scholarly community, still consider popular culture to be somehow a lesser subject to explore academically. Some colleagues might secretly, or even openly, scoff at the material making up your research corpus. Thankfully, these attitudes are changing.

FN: You co-edited the first anthology of queer literature in Ukraine 120 Pages of “Sodom.” How visible is queer literature today inside Ukraine? Has the full-scale invasion changed views of the majority about queer people in Ukraine?

IS:  This is always an exciting subject to discuss, because we have just recently finished collecting the submissions for the first-ever queer poetry competition in Ukraine, which I co-organize with my colleague Polina Horodyska. The name of the competition is ‘Holosni’ which in Ukrainian means both ‘vowels,’ but also being ‘loud’ or ‘vocal.’ We are now reading through the submissions, and it’s a daily source of joy to discover fantastic new poetry, because queer writing in Ukraine, unfortunately, still retains limited visibility. We have had a few books in the past decade centered around queer narratives, and several great queer young adult books penned by Ukrainian authors. However, very few writers are openly out as LGBTQI+ people.

Ukrainian society still remains not the friendliest environment to be queer in. The community continues to face prejudice and discrimination — sometimes even violence. Recently, a bookstore in Kyiv had to cancel a presentation of a queer young adult novel because of the threats they received from a far-right group.

That’s why a lot of writing reflecting queer experiences still remains on the margins, often invisible. Because of this, when we launched our contest in early March, we had no idea how many submissions we would get, but in the end, we collected 114 submissions, coming not only from inside Ukraine but from Ukrainians based in 12 other countries. We are particularly grateful to our fantastic NGO partners KyivPride and Sfera for spreading the word.

FN: You lived in China and recently visited Taiwan. What are the reactions of people in China and Taiwan when they realize you are from Ukraine? 

IS: Indeed, I lived in China for three years, between 2019–2023, first in Hangzhou, then in Nanjing, where I worked in international schools. My visit to Taiwan this winter was my first time on the island.

Most people in both places begin by telling me how sorry they are about what’s happening in my country. I always appreciate these words deeply. But I find that, on average, people in Taiwan tend to be much better informed about the dynamics of the war and the causes behind it than people on the mainland. While my friends among the Chinese intellectuals know where to find reliable information about the war, I had many well-meaning Chinese tell me how they wish peace for Ukraine would come soon, without recognizing that Ukrainians don’t just want peace at any cost.

In Taiwan, we have a very important shared topic: our colonial past. Of course, Ukraine’s colonisation by the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union was not the same experience as Taiwan’s colonial past. But overall, there is a general lack of knowledge about Ukraine in the region. This is why we, Ukrainians, have a lot of work to do in building cultural bridges with East Asia and South-East Asia, including in the Sinosphere. Here poetry can be an important tool of such cultural diplomacy, as some projects demonstrate: My poems have been published in the April issue of Li Poetry, translated into Mandarin by a native of Taipei Hsu YuHsuan, a prolific translator from Ukrainian. I also hope to see my poems translated into the Taiwanese Hokkien language someday. Other poems I wrote during my stay in Taipei are now incorporated into a book, ‘I Don’t Speak This Language’ — a joint project combining poetry and art by a Suzhou-based Ukrainian artist Yuliia Tveritina. In this book, we explore our experience as Ukrainians living, working, and traveling in the Sinosphere. It is our dream, too, to bring this project to the Taiwanese readers one day.