Five Leaves Visits... Lviv UNESCO City of Literature, featuring Olesya Yaremchuk & Stephan Collishaw

This is the last of six international online events organised by Five Leaves Bookshop, with funding from Arts Council England. The events bring writers from our region of England together with native writers from the cities we are visiting. All of those cities are UNESCO Cities of Literature, as is Nottingham, and as Nottingham's independent bookshop we want to help to establish links with other Cities of Literature, their authors and their bookshops.
Olesya Yaremchuk is a Ukrainian journalist and writer who specialises in topics of cultural and national identity, and the frontier. She has studied at universities in Lviv and Vienna, and worked as a journalist in Ukraine and Germany. Since 2015 she has been working on Our Others, a project on national minorities in Ukraine in the online magazine The Ukrainians. She has published an important book based on this project, Our Others: Stories of Ukrainian Diversity. Her writing has been translated into Czech, German and English.
Born in Nottingham, Stephan Collishaw decided to become a teacher in 1991 after studying at Goldsmiths College. On a whim, he relocated to Vilnius in 1995, where he met and married a Lithuanian woman. The family lived in Palma de Mallorca for two years then moved to Nottinghamshire in 1999, where he took an MA in creative writing at Nottingham Trent University. His first three novels were set in Lithuania, and his most recent, A Child Called Happiness, is about two stories of struggle 115 years apart over a farm in Zimbabwe.
Hosted in Nottingham by Ross Bradshaw, and in Lviv by Iryna Starovoyt.

[@noirpress3310]

Hugely impressed that the Ukrainian hosts were ready to come online to discuss writing, language and culture while under attack from Russia.

[@lviv-cityofliterature3215]

Hello from Lviv - UNESCO City of Literature :)
Thank you.
It is our aim now to promote Ukrainian culture and we are strong. None of the russian will destroy us and our literature.

[@FiveLeavesBookshopNottingham]

It certainly brought tears to the eyes of Five Leaves staff members. So sad you have to be so brave, but so glad you are.