Seven Stories scoops Ukrainian soldier Chapeye's short story collection

Seven Stories Press has acquired the debut story collection by Ukrainian author and soldier Artem Chapeye, translated by Zenia Tompkins.

Editor Silvia Stramenga acquired world English rights for The Ukraine from Emma Shercliff at Laxfield Literary Associates. Publication is planned for late spring 2023, with the collection being released simultaneously in the US and UK. Translation and screen rights will be handled by Blake Friedmann Literary Agency, in association with Laxfield Literary Associates.

Chapeye, who is currently serving in the Ukrainian army, has written a new foreword for the English edition of the collection, which contains 26 short stories and deliberately blurs the line between fiction and non-fiction. The book was a finalist for the Lviv Unesco City of Literature Prize and the BBC Book of the Year Award in 2018. The title story was featured in the New Yorker – the first piece of prose by a Ukrainian writer to appear in the magazine.

Stramenga said: “Chapeye’s stories and reportage give us glimpses of lives lived and imagined and in every one of them we can sense the dreams and the fears, the harshness and the poetry, sheltered within the melancholic, brave heart that pulses throughout. The cities in these stories have become familiar to us, Kharkiv, Kyiv, Mariupol, Zaporizhzhia, their people, whether real or fictional, are always radiant as they carry on with their dignified lives amid hardship and isolation. Chapeye, who is currently fighting for his country, luminously captures a whole world and its people, the glinting stars of his stories.”

“When creating this book, I made a conscious decision to mix fictional short stories with creative non-fiction, even though advised against it by publishers,” Chapeye said. “I wanted to show the ‘real’ Ukraine by means of both fiction and non-fiction, when you can’t say which is which – reality is sometimes so strange that the events and people you’d think were definitely made up, are in fact the actual truth. In retrospect, I now see that the main purpose of the whole book was showing why we Ukrainians are so desperate to defend our beloved, imperfect and sometimes rather weird country.”

Translator Tompkins said: “It’s a privilege to be translating Artem’s The Ukraine and playing a role in bringing his intimate knowledge of and love for his homeland to English bookshelves. This is one of a handful of contemporary Ukrainian books that made me feel like I had been teleported to Ukraine, with all its grit and astounding splendour. Artem’s Ukraine, as presented in this collection, is unpretentious, complex, ironic, comical and sad, yet achingly endearing as well. Like Āina-kāri, the dizzying Persian art assembled of finely cut mirrors, these stories about ordinary people, mundane events and unremarkable places dazzle as a collection and succeed in conveying a sense of the raw and humble beauty that is Ukraine and its people.”