Hello and welcome to the Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.

This week, my guest is Andrei Kirchov, who is probably the best known Ukrainian writer to English-speaking readers, whose books include Death in the Penguin, the Bickford Fuse and Grey Bees, but whose new work is not a novel but a diary.

Diary of an invasion is out now.

Andre, welcome.

In this book, as you kind of admit in the course of it, the war, the new iteration of the ongoing war in Ukraine has changed

your job, hasn't it? Well, it changed not only my job, but my life. And in fact, actually,

I became first time in my life officially a refugee. I was displayed person for five months.

I have lots of new experience, together with my family, actually. I was displayed person for five months. I have lots of new experience,

together with my family. Actually, I was accompanied by my wife on many journeys, and we were together in Ushgorod, on the border with Slovakia, in Western Ukraine, in the flat that was

offered to us by an old lady, whom we never met. And my job is now, of course,

yes, I write essays and articles and diaries about what is happening in Ukraine. I am daily in touch

with my friends in different towns and cities of Ukraine, in my village near Kiev also, and even

with people who are under occupation but sometimes get access to internet.

And I mean, how does it sit with you this transfer from becoming an imaginative writer in a sense to, you know, moving genre into what we might call kind of documentary realism and to being a spokesman?

Because some writers are comfortable with being a national spokesman or seek it.

Is it something that sits easily with you?

I mean, I felt it as my duty, actually, from the beginning of the war. After my first shock

come down and we reached in three days, the destination managed to send our daughter who lived

at that time in London back to London through Slovakia. I started actually

writing non-stop for media, for newspapers and magazines and given interviews and etc. And I think

I was like doing it without thinking about my attitude towards this for first five, six months.

And now I feel some kind of pain that I don't write fiction.

...