Children’s Books in the Russia-Ukraine War: The Role of Translations
I am pleased to cohost this free webinar on translated literature for children and young adults. Please join us!
Explorations in Translation for Children is a webinar series co-organized by The Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing (University of Reading) in partnership with Outside in World, the organization dedicated to exploring and promoting children’s literature in translation.
On Thursday 11 December at 5pm UK time we will be in conversation with the leaders of the project PUBLISH: Children’s Books in the Russia-Ukraine War on the role of translations.
This online webinar is free & open to all. To join via MS Teams, please register here.
How do children’s books cross borders in wartime and what happens to them when they do? This joint talk traces the translational lives of war-related titles from commissioning to circulation, and the challenges the publishers meet along the way. Birgitte Beck Pristed introduces the Aarhus University project PUBLISH: Children’s Books in the Russia-Ukraine War, examining how Ukrainian and Russian children’s publishers operate under wartime conditions and how the books reflect child readers’ experiences of war and dislocation. In this talk, she focuses on the publishers’ hurdles of bringing books across borders. Drawing on new interviews with Ukrainian publishers, Nadia Pavlyk examines how international support and solidarity are negotiated in practice, and how these transnational networks shape the capacity to produce, translate, and present war-themed children’s literature under fire. Finally, Ekaterina Shatalova shows how, in Russia’s “hybrid” censorship environment, translated children’s books become politically charged objects: the same titles can function as cultural solidarity while being securitised as “threats.” Together, the speakers argue that translation is double-edged – both a vehicle of ethical resistance and a liability within contested information regimes.
Ekaterina Shatalova is a PhD fellow at Aarhus University, working on the project “PUBLISH: Children’s Books in the Russia-Ukraine War.” Before turning to conflict and children’s books, she earned a Master’s degree in Victorian literature at Oxford University (2018), followed by Erasmus Mundus International degree in Children’s Literature, Media and Culture (2022). She is also a prolific translator of children’s books and TV shows. When not translating, she scouts and reviews books for international publishers and book organisations (IBBY, Children’s Books Ireland). Her recent article “Image of Migrants and Refugees in Contemporary Russian Children’s Literature: A Case Study of Alexey Oleynikov’s Works” (2024) was published in Filoteknos.
Nadiia Pavlyk is a Doctor of Science (Social Pedagogy), a professor at the Department of Social Technologies (Zhytomyr Ivan Franko State University, Ukraine) and a researcher of the MSCA4Ukraine project DaR:ua “Dialogues and Reading: Shared Reading for Ukrainian Young People” (Department of Global Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark). Her research focuses on non-formal education for excluded groups, youth work and youth policy based on Council of Europe standards and approaches, shared reading and children’s books in the Russia-Ukraine war.
Birgitte Beck Pristed is Associate Professor in Russian Studies at the Department of Global Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark. She holds a Ph.D. from the Johannes-Gutenberg-University of Mainz, Germany, awarded with distinction 2014. She is author of an illustrated monograph on post-Soviet Russian book design and print culture The New Russian Book. A Graphic Cultural History (New Directions in Book History, Palgrave, 2017). Her main research areas are print and media history of the Soviet and post-Soviet eras with a second strand in children’s books. Her current research project focuses on children’s book publishing in the Russia-Ukraine war. https://projects.au.dk/publish