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 organizers: “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.
