Book Launch: A Wartime Guide for Anglophone Readers by Marko Pavlyshyn

Marko Pavlyshyn’s Ukrainian Literature: A Wartime Guide for Anglophone Readers has recently been published by Cambridge University Press in its series “Elements in Soviet and Post-Soviet History,” edited by Mark Edele and Rebecca Friedman.

A book launch will be held at:
the Clyde Hotel, 385 Cardigan St, Carlton, Victoria
at 6.30 p.m. on Wednesday 18 June 2025.

The author, Emeritus Professor Marko Pavlyshyn, will be in conversation with one of the series editors, Professor Mark Edele, Hansen Professor in History at the University of Melbourne. The event, hosted by the Ukrainian Studies Association of Australia and New Zealand, will be chaired by Dr Iryna Skubii, Mykola Zerov Fellow in Ukrainian Studies at Melbourne University.

Admission is free. Drinks will be available at hotel prices.

Ukrainian Literature: A Wartime Guide for Anglophone Readers will not be available for sale at the event. Print-on-demand copies may be ordered via this link.

Ukrainian Literature: A Wartime Guide for Anglophone Readers is an introduction for general readers and students to Ukrainian literature in English translation. It takes as its starting point the responses of Ukrainian poets and prose writers to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the preceding eight-year war. Each of the Element’s ten sections describes a key event in Ukrainian cultural history in its literary context, surveying related works and their authors, Ukrainian and international literary and intellectual movements, and developments in political and social life. The Element gives preeminent attention to a theme which the war has foregrounded: the enduringly fraught relationship of Ukraine and Russia. While focussing mainly on texts in Ukrainian, the Element refers to other literary cultures – Polish, Russian, Jewish and Crimean Tatar, among others – whose participants were active on the territory of today’s Ukraine.

Marko Pavlyshyn is an Emeritus Professor of Ukrainian Studies at Monash University, where he taught Ukrainian language and literature from 1983 to 2019 and was Director of the Mykola Zerov Centre for Ukrainian Studies in 2004-2018. His scholarly specialisation is modern and contemporary Ukrainian literature. His publications include the Cambridge Element Ukrainian Literature: A Wartime Guide for Anglophone Readers (2025), the books Ukraine and Europe: Cultural Encounters and Negotiations (co-edited with Giovanna Brogi and Serhii Plokhy, 2017), Literature, Nation and Modernity (2013), Olha Kobylians’ka: Interpretations (2008) and Canon and Iconostasis (1997) and many scholarly articles and chapters. He is the editor and co-editor of several scholarly collections. At Monash University he was head of the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics in 2005-2010 and at various times director of the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, the Centre for European Studies and the PhD Program in Literary and Cultural Studies. Marko Pavlyshyn is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and an International Member of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

Mark Edele is the inaugural Hansen Professor in History at the University of Melbourne. He is a historian of the Soviet Union and its successor states, in particular Russia, and one of the editors of Elements in Soviet and Post-Soviet History (Cambridge University Press). A former Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellow, he has served as Deputy Dean of Melbourne University’s Faculty of Arts. He was trained as a historian at the Universities of Erlangen, Tübingen, Moscow and Chicago. His publications include Soviet Veterans of the Second World War (2008), Stalinist Society (2011), Stalin’s Defectors (2017), Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union (edited with Atina Grossmann and Sheila Fitzpatrick, 2017), The Soviet Union: A Short History (2019), Debates on Stalinism (2020); The Politics of Veteran Benefits in the Twentieth Century: A Comparative History, with Martin Crotty and Neil Diamant (2020); Stalinism at War: The Soviet Union in World War II and Russia’s War against Ukraine: The Whole Story (2023). He is a Chief Investigator on ARC Discovery Grants “KGB Empire: State Security Archives in the former Eastern Bloc” (2020-2023) and “Aftermaths of War: Violence, Trauma, Displacement, 1815-1950” (2020-2024).