Charlotte Higgins's 'Ukrainian Lessons' to launch 20 August, exploring art's survival under siege
A book about how art endures when war tries to erase it lands on shelves this week. Charlotte Higgins's Ukrainian Lessons, published by Penguin and scheduled for release on 20 August 2026, draws on three years of reporting trips to Ukraine and two decades of cultural journalism (Penguin). Penguin describes it as a first-hand account of art, survival and resistance in wartime Ukraine (Penguin).
Higgins is the Guardian's chief culture writer and a classicist — her training in ancient Greek and Roman literature shapes how she reads the destruction and preservation of culture around her. The book recounts an autumn visit to Kharkiv, Ukraine's second city, a place that has lived under bombardment since the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022.
The Guardian published its review on 18 August 2026 (The Guardian). The review frames the book around the collision of art and war — the question of what happens to creative life when the cities where it is made are being shelled.
Higgins introduces readers to artists who kept working through the fighting. Ukrainian artist Anna Zvyagintseva designed a bodysuit impregnated with seeds, titled Sustainable Costume for an Invader — a garment that would, if buried with a dead soldier, turn a grave into a flowerbed. Marharyta Polovinko, a Ukrainian artist killed in action in 2025 while serving as a drone operator, made pencil drawings about the war using her own blood as a medium. Yaroslav Pilunskiy, a cinematographer from the Kyiv-based film collective Babylon 13, was working drones for the Ukrainian army. Diana Berg, a cultural manager and activist, was twice forced to flee from eastern Ukrainian cities.
These are not profiles of distant figures. Higgins places them inside a living argument about whether culture is a luxury that war suspends or a necessity that war makes more urgent. Her classical training gives the question a long lineage — the same debate runs through ancient accounts of cities under siege.
Penguin is issuing Ukrainian Lessons under ISBN 9781787335974 (Penguin). The title appears on Penguin's list of notable August releases (Penguin).
What makes the book unusual is its refusal to treat art and war as separate subjects. The artists Higgins writes about did not stop making work when the shelling began. Some of them picked up rifles and drones instead. The book sits where those two acts — making and fighting — meet, and asks what culture means when the people creating it may not survive.
