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Ukraine’s best known novelist Andrey Kurkov joins us to speak about life, literature, and the war in Ukraine, as well as the complexities of the Ukrainian identity. Andrey Kurkov has been hailed as a latter-day Bulgakov and a Ukrainian Murakami, his works injected with an absurdist sense of the oddities of life. But with the unfolding of events in Ukraine this year, his fictional reflections on conflict in his nation have become even more pertinent. Our host for this episode is the BBC’s Chief International Correspondent, Lyse Doucet, who has been covering the conflict in Ukraine since it unfolded in February.

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