By Andrey Kurkov
Paperback introduction by Christopher Miller
Winner of the NBCC Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize for Grey Bees
One of the most important Ukrainian voices throughout the Russian invasion, the author of Death and the Penguin and Grey Bees collects his searing dispatches from the heart of Kyiv.
Publication Date: April 4, 2023
Hardback: 9781646052813
Paperback: 9781646054268
eBook: 9781646052820
Available in paperback: April 28th, 2026
Description
Dispatches from a nation under siege, from the winner of the NBCC Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize for Grey Bees
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, novelist and journalist Andrey Kurkov was forced to flee his adopted hometown of Kyiv. This journal is a harrowing record of the months leading up to and after the invasion, as Kurkov migrates to the Ukrainian countryside for shelter. In small villages, surrounded by other refugees, he pens incisive dispatches on the latest border conflicts and bombardments affecting his loved ones. These wartime entries ruminate on Ukraine’s historic past and possibilities for its future.
An avid political commentator, Kurkov has written for prominent English newspapers, delivered lectures, and been interviewed across Europe on the war in Ukraine. Now with an introduction by Financial Times Ukraine correspondent Christopher Miller and a 2025 afterword from the author reflecting on the years that have elapsed since the war began, Dairy of an Invasion is a deeply affecting glimpse into the day-to-day realities of millions of refugees.
Biographical Information
Born near Leningrad in 1961, Andrey Kurkov was a journalist, prison warder, cameraman and screenplay-writer before he became well known as a novelist. He received “hundreds of rejections” and was a pioneer of self-publishing, selling more than 75,000 copies of his books in a single year. His novel Death and the Penguin, his first in English translation, became an international bestseller, translated into more than thirty languages. As well as writing fiction for adults and children, he has become known as a commentator and journalist on Ukraine for the international media. His work of reportage, Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev, was published in 2014, followed by the novel The Bickford Fuse (MacLehose Press, 2016). He lives in Kyiv with his British wife and their three children.
Christopher Miller is the chief Ukraine correspondent for the Financial Times and author of The War Came To Us: Life And Death In Ukraine, winner of the 2024 Witold Pilecki International Book Award. He has lived in and worked in Ukraine since 2010, reporting on Ukraine’s Euromaidan revolution, Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea and its invasions of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022. He has broken major international news stories, including uncovering Russian war crimes, with his reporting cited as evidence before the International Criminal Court. Miller was previously a world and national security reporter for Politico and a world correspondent for BuzzFeed News. When he’s not in Kyiv or on the front lines in eastern Ukraine, he lives with his wife and two Ukrainian cats in Brooklyn, New York.
Reviews
"Kurkov’s narrative moves are that of a grandmaster. . .The real story here. . . [is] with Kurkov’s own feelings towards how the war he observes is transforming the people and places he knows so well. . . It takes a true strategist who can think several moves out to see beyond the present bloodshed to acknowledge, as Kurkov does, that 'for many people, history has long ceased to be a science and has become part of literature.'" —Joe Stanek, Chicago Review of Books
"Probably the first important literary work to emerge from a conflict that appears likely to alter the course of world history, Diary of an Invasion is a thoughtful and humane memoir by one of Ukraine’s most prominent living authors." —Simon Caterson, The Sydney Morning Herald