Artem Chekh

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Artem Chekh’s writing has reached readers across Central Europe. His Absolute Zero (2017) was shortlisted for Poland’s Ryszard Kapuściński Prize for literary reportage in 2019. It has since been translated into English, German, Polish and Czech. The same year, Chekh received the Joseph Conrad-Korzeniowski Literary Prize, awarded by the Polish Institute in Kyiv. His novel Who Are You? (2021) was adapted into the feature film Rock. Paper. Grenade Rock. Paper. Grenade, directed by Iryna Tsilyk Iryna Tsilyk, which premiered premiered at the Warsaw Film Festival in 2022.

Chekh writes about ordinary men shaped by extraordinary circumstance. He is drawn to young men raised without working models of morality or manhood. His prose favours tedium and psychological wear over conventional heroics: the boredom, the waiting, the slow and unglamorous reshaping of a person. This register runs through both Absolute Zero and The Dress-Up Game (2025), written eight years apart. His fiction also turns to a different absence: a generation left without inherited codes for adulthood after the certainties of an earlier era collapsed. In Who Are You?, that gap takes shape as a damaged mentor who unknowingly passes his own wounds on to the boy in his care.

His latest novel, We Didn’t Expect You (2026), is a story of loneliness, memory and art. Its hero, a painter, survives a battle only to learn that he has been officially declared dead. Instead of returning to his old life, he decides to leave his past behind. Chekh first conceived the book as a black comedy, but in the writing it became what he calls a “luminous tragedy”. He considers it his best prose to date.

The New York Times

Recent and archived work by Artem Chekh for The New York Times Recent and archived work by Artem Chekh for The New York Times

Apofenie

“I am very skeptical about the impact of art on the masses”: An Interview with Artem Chekh “I am very skeptical about the impact of art on the masses”: An Interview with Artem Chekh

Interviewed by Kate Tsurkan

Chekh spoke with Kate Tsurkan about the genre of war literature, on what level the Ukrainian public engages with artistic work about the war, whether or not an artist has any significant impact on society, and more.

Global Voices

‘I will not write about this war,’ says acclaimed Ukrainian writer-turned soldier ‘I will not write about this war,’ says acclaimed Ukrainian writer-turned soldier

By Artem Chekh

Translated from Ukrainian by Svitlana Bregman

Financial Times

Rock, Paper, Grenade — an unflinching portrait of 1990s Ukraine Rock, Paper, Grenade — an unflinching portrait of 1990s Ukraine

By Uilleam Blacker

Artem Chekh’s latest novel is a provocative and moving exploration of his country’s coming of age.