Slavenka Drakulić was honored to speak at this year’s literary festival Lviv Book Forum. Along with Vakhtang Kebuladze, Anne Applebom, Tetyana Ogarkova, and Maksym Yakovlev, she participated at the panel War as the collapse of civilization: will there be happiness after the war?
Writing about the festival and the role of culture and books in Ukraine right now, as well as the great power of stories in turbulent times, author, journalist and Guardian’s chief culture writer Charlotte Higgins quotes Slavenka Drakulić:
The Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulić, who lived through the violent collapse of Yugoslavia, warned Ukrainians that, postwar, “your experience will be so specific that transmitting it will be very difficult” to those abroad – and that coaxing their society back to peacetime norms will be a long, hard task of patching and repairing, “like making a quilt”.
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