Christina Lamb has narrated this article for you to listen to.
The first indication that this was a literary festival like no other came with the request to provide ‘proof of life’ questions in case of kidnap. I’ve been to some unusual festivals – earlier this year I found myself discussing war-rape, ancient and modern, with the classicist Mary Beard on a barefoot island in the Maldives – and had some unusual festival encounters, such as the woman who asked me to sign a book to her dead husband, adding that he was reading it when he died. This, however, was my first in a war zone. There was a polite warning from the Lviv Book Forum organisers: ‘If there is an airstrike, we will interrupt the event.’ It’s all part of the resilience of Ukrainians, determined in the face of Russian aggression that life must go on.
Yet within days of arriving, it had already become the Other War. ‘Breaking News’ pings on our phones telling of the slaughter and abduction of young and old in Israel by Hamas terrorists. Even in a country itself under brutal invasion, it was sickening. A reminder too of the Palestinian issue that in my early days as a correspondent 25 years ago was the most urgent foreign crisis, but is one we had all somehow started pretending had gone away.
I had travelled across the border from Poland with my fellow participant Dr Rachel Clarke, a palliative care doctor and writer whose impassioned tweets from NHS front lines I followed during Covid. The night before I’d watched Partygate, the jaw-dropping Channel 4 docudrama about Downing Street parties in the pandemic, so asked if she’d seen it. ‘I couldn’t bear to,’ she replies.
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