Charlotte Higgins & Sasha Dovzhyk | Art and Resistance in Ukraine
Sun 22 Nov 2026 | 4:00pm - 5:00pm
In a war fuelled by the attempted erasure of Ukrainian culture, art encapsulates resistance and resilience. In her beautiful and heartbreaking Ukrainian Lessons, Guardian journalist Charlotte Higgins explores the profound connections between war, art and life. Ukrainian writer Sasha Dovzhyk’s Apocalypse Baroque is an astonishing genre-bending anti-memoir that reimagines the lives of contemporary Ukrainians as folk tales. Join Charlotte and Sasha to discuss the risks that artists take – and why culture is worth fighting for.
Chaired by Mary Hockaday.
Venue: Old Divinity School
Duration: 1 hour
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Author Biographies
Charlotte Higgins is the acclaimed author of Under Another Sky, which was shortlisted for awards including the Samuel Johnson (now Baillie Gifford) Prize for non-fiction, Red Thread, which was a Radio 4 Book of the Week and won the Arnold Bennett Prize, and Greek Myths, which was shortlisted for Waterstones Book of the Year. She is Chief Culture Writer of The Guardian, a past winner of the Classical Association prize, and a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. She lives in London.
Sasha Dovzhyk is a Ukrainian writer and scholar who lives in Lviv and is the Director of INDEX: Institute for Documentation and Exchange, an organisation dedicated to advancing knowledge about Ukraine worldwide. She holds a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Birkbeck, University of London, and has taught at that institution as well as at University College London. Her writing on Ukrainian resistance has appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Guardian, CNN Opinion and elsewhere. She was the Editor-in-Chief of London Ukrainian Review between 2021 and 2026.
Chair Biography
Mary Hockaday is Master of Trinity Hall, where she studied English as an undergraduate. Until 2022 she was Controller BBC World Service English. From 2009-2014 she was Head of the BBC Newsroom, overseeing the BBC’s core news services on radio, television and online for domestic and global audiences. Mary was Editor of BBC World Service News and Current Affairs from 2001 to 2006. WSNCA won a Special Sony Gold award in recognition of its 9/11 coverage. She serves on the board of the British Library and is an Independent Non-executive Director with the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales. She is the author of Kafka, Love and Courage, the Life of Milena Jesenska.
