I'm David Knowles and this is a special episode of Ukraine, the latest.

Over the past two weeks in Ukraine we've spoken to a huge number of people from almost every sphere of Ukrainian life.

I've spoken to students in school, parents in mourning, military commanders,

and caught up with my friends to hear their thoughts on the challenges facing the country.

Last week we had the opportunity to speak to Andre Kirkoff, one of Ukraine's most prominent novelists.

At 62, Kirkoff has had a long and illustrious literary career, a novelist,

diarist, children's author and script writer, it can feel like the author of the world

famous death and the pengu Penguin has done it all.

Kerkov invited us to his apartment in the heart of Kief, to talk about literature, the war,

and the future of the Russian language in Ukraine.

Silently he poured as coffee as we set up our recording equipment.

Then we started talking.

Here's our conversation.

Well, Andre, thank you so much for your time and thank you for inviting us to your beautiful apartment here in the heart of Kyiv's Old Town.

Can I start by asking a fairly broad question?

This week, obviously, we're marking the anniversary of the full scale invasion, but it's also been 10 years since the revolution of dignity since my Dan.

How do you think Ukrainian society and culture has changed in that time.

I would say actually the society changed very radically.

I remember all the changes starting from 91, 1992, because after the collapse of the Soviet Union the Ukrainian youth and the

young intellectuals were in principle apolitical including artist writers. So writers didn't want to write novels about

social issues, political issues. And then the first change happened in 2004 after Orange Revolution. Then we had the first

social issues as topics of essays and prose. And from 2014 from Euro-Maidan, of course, the civil society became very militant, very active.

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