Edinburgh International Book Festival round-up: Andrey Kurkov | Olesya Khromeychuk | Andrew O’Hagan

Happily, for his fans, he has picked up his fiction pen again, writing The Silver Bone, a crime novel set in Kyiv in 1919 when Ukraine was under the control of the Bolsheviks. But writing fiction set in the present day still eludes him. To write fiction, he says, you need to detach yourself from the world in which you are living: how can you do that when you’re following daily missile warnings and updates from the front? In the present day, he writes non-fiction - like his new book of essays, Our Daily War - to tell the world about ordinary life inside Ukraine.

That is also the passion of Olesya Khromeychuk, a London-based Ukrainian historian who has written widely for newspapers and magazines about the current conflict. She is also the author of a memoir, The Death of a Soldier Told By His Sister, about her brother who died in action in 2017. The book was reissued after the full-scale invasion with additional chapters.

Both encouraged the Book Festival audience - a sell-out crowd - to stay informed, to read about the history and context so we understand more about Ukraine’s long-running struggle for independence and can challenge the news agenda put out Russia’s propaganda machine.

And Kurkov spoke of the centrality of culture, that even now in underground shelters in Kharkhiv, Ukrainians are debating the ideas and values of an independent nation, and in Kyiv and Odessa, citizens visit the opera, theatre, museums and cultural sites as acts of defiance.

Later the same evening, Andrew O’Hagan joined Andrew Marr on stage to talk about his state-of-the-nation novel, Caledonian Road. The magnum opus went straight to the top of the bestseller charts and O’Hagan shared the news that the screen rights have been acquired by Johan Renck, director of the acclaimed HBO series Chernobyl, to make a multi-season network show, and that Will Smith, the showrunner on Slow Horses, is involved as screenwriter.

O’Hagan said that the book had taken “ten years of pavement pounding”, using his journalistic skills to research a broad cross-section of British society from young black gang members in South London to Bangladeshi textile workers in the Midlands, to the royal enclosure at a polo match in Windsor (where the conversation was so colourful he had to write it down on his shirt sleeves in the toilets). He described finishing the book, which has 60 characters, as feeling like “air traffic control trying to land 37 planes at the same time”.

While he set out to nail what’s going wrong in society, he admitted that his protagonist, Campbell Flynn, a successful art historian and public intellectual, does bear a few similarities to himself. “It’s not enough to point at Boris Johnson and others and write a funny novel saying they’re guilty, you also have to point the finger at your own kind, because you are also part of the problem.”

Written under the malaise of 14 years of Tory governments, he hopes Caledonian Road is already becoming a period piece. It is, he says, his most optimistic novel yet. While he is concerned for the current generation, whose imaginations are likely to be “darkened for a lifetime” by the effects of austerity and the pandemic, the same generation is a source of hope. If the decks can be cleared of selfishness and corruption, there is a new generation waiting in the wings with new ideas about ethics, decency, nationhood and belonging, and a will to do things differently.