‘The Most Beautiful Beetle of Ukraine. Book of Colours’ (Найкрасивіший жук України. Книга кольорів) is a hybrid intergenerational autofiction that reflects on everyday life in Eastern Ukraine from the 1930s to the present, spanning the Holodomor, World War II, Soviet industrialisation, Independence, and the current Russo-Ukrainian war. Written from the first person, the project blurs the boundaries between fiction and archive, combines historical trauma with humour, and human drama with close attention to mundane, everyday details, mixing my own writing with the memoir of my late grandfather, a mining engineer who was born in a tiny Ukrainian village in 1932 and spent most of his life in Donetsk.
