PEN Ukraine’s literary volunteering trips

Since June 2022, PEN Ukraine has been organizing literary volunteering trips to liberated and frontline territories of Ukraine.

Each trip is aimed at:

• providing the sense of context and understanding what Ukraine is living through today;
• facilitating networking and emergence of new initiatives between intellectuals, cultural managers, civic activists, volunteers, the military, and the local authorities;
• providing aid from writers and journalists for humanitarian and military needs in the region;
• collecting stories of the people who survived their cities’ occupation or siege;
• supporting destroyed or damaged libraries which serve as cultural hubs in their localities, within the Invincible Libraries campaign;
• documenting Russia’s crimes against Ukrainian culture;
• creating informational materials for Ukrainian and foreign media.

The purpose of the literary volunteering trips to liberated and frontline territories of Ukraine consists in documenting Russian occupiers’ crimes against Ukrainian culture, arranging meetings with the local audiences, expanding the network of contacts and collecting evidence for journalistic materials.

By this time, more than 30 literary volunteering trips to all liberated and frontline regions of Ukraine including the Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Odesa, Mykolaiv, Kherson, Dnipro, Sumy, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kyiv regions etc have been carried out.

Ukrainian and foreign writers and journalists are involved in every trip.