Timothy Snyder, renowned American historian specialising in the history of Central and Central Europe, opened Writing in Times of War with a mini-lecture on the Russian attack on Ukraine.

Writers Andrei Kurkov, Timothy Snyder and Lisa Weeda then explored in a  conversation with Eva Hartog, using their own work and the work of their fellow writers, what it means to write about and in times of war. Is language adequate, does language offer comfort and is language the best medium to tell the world about the situation in a war zone? Is fiction sometimes necessary to describe the facts?

Timothy Snyder is an internationally leading historian specialising in Central and Eastern Europe, Russia and the Holocaust. The professor of History at Yale University has published influential studies such as Nationalism, Marxism, and Modern Central Europe: A Biography of Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz (1998); The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 (2003); Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist’s Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine (2005); The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke (2008); Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010), Thinking the Twentieth Century (with Tony Judt, 2012); Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (2015); On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017); and The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (2018) and the highly topical On Freedom (2024).

Andrei Kurkov is a Ukrainian writer famous for the mix of harsh realism and absurdist humour in his novels and non fiction books. He was born in Leningrad, grows up in Kyiv and writes in Russian and Ukrainian. His works have been translated in 37 languages and were published in 65 countries. He is a respected commentator on the situation in his country. In The President's Last Love, Kurkov employs humour and cynicism to describe how a boy manages to work his way up to become the most powerful man in the country. Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev, his eyewitness account of political unrest in the Ukraine, was published in 2014. Dairy of an Invasion (2022) and Our daily war (2024) are collections of Kurkov's writings and broadcasts as well as a remarkable record of a brilliant writer at the forefront of a 21st-century war. In 2024, he published The Silver Bone, the first part of The Kyiv Mysteries, his series of crime novels in historical settings. The second part The Stolen Heart will be published in 2025; the third part The Public Sauna Case is in development.

LIsa Weeda writes prose, plays and non-fiction. Her chapbook De benen van Petrovski (Petrovski's Legs), a literary account of her trip to the Ukraine, where her grandmother comes from and a large part of her family still lives, was published in 2016. Her debut novel Aleksandra was published in 2021. In it, her grandmother is the hub of the story. She sends main character Lisa to the Donbas to search for her uncle Kolja. The novel, grimly topical due to the war in Ukraine, encompasses in a maelstrom of dreams and nightmares both the history of a country and a family. Weeda has published work in De Revisor, Tirade, Das Magazin, De Titaan and De Optimist. In 2024 she published her novel Dans dans revolutie (Dance, dance, revolution).

Eva Hartog is a Dutch-Russian journalist who worked in Russia for ten years. Hartog studied Political Philosophy at the Leiden University. She was the editor-in-chief of the English-language newspaper The Moscow Times from 2017 to 2019. As a correspondent for publications such as De Groene Amsterdammer, she lived and worked in Moscow until her visa was not renewed in 2023. Now, she is a journalist for Politico where she publishes about Russia and about autocratic tendencies across the globe.

Writing in Times of War was curated for Writers Unlimited Festival 2025 by Ilonka Reintjens.