Oleksandr Mykhed

Photo: Julia Kochetova

To view the full-size version, click here here

Oleksandr Mykhed's documentary account, The Language of War (2023), was acquired by Penguin, whose English edition (2024) was named a Telegraph Book of the Year – one of relatively few first-person Ukrainian accounts, as opposed to journalists' reporting, to reach international publication in this form. Selected essays and excerpts from Mykhed's work have been translated into several languages. The Language of War itself has appeared in Polish, Dutch, and Slovak, with Chinese and Czech editions forthcoming.

He has written for The Financial Times The Financial Times, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, The New Statesman The New Statesman, and The Guardian The Guardian, appeared as a guest on CNN and NPR, and shared the stage in public conversation with Salman Rushdie Salman Rushdie, Art Spiegelman Art Spiegelman, Sofi Oksanen, Fernanda Melchor, and Julian Barnes Julian Barnes. 

The Language of War wove Mykhed's own experience together with that of his family and friends into a documentary chorus of personal testimony. It followed his earlier non-fiction book I Will Mix Your Blood with Coal (2020), based on expeditions through six cities in eastern Ukraine, which traced how a distinct regional identity there had been built up over decades through myth and propaganda. It became a longseller in Ukraine and was published in Germany, Poland, Slovakia, and the UK. Mykhed has held a CEC ArtsLink fellowship at the University of Kansas (2015) and a virtual residency at the University of Oxford (2022).