This is the last of six international online events organised by Five Leaves Bookshop, with funding from Arts Council England. The events bring writers from our region of England together with native writers from the cities we are visiting. All of those cities are UNESCO Cities of Literature, as is Nottingham, and as Nottingham’s independent bookshop we want to help to establish links with other Cities of Literature, their authors and their bookshops.

Born in Nottingham, Stephan Collishaw decided to become a teacher in 1991 after studying at Goldsmiths College. On a whim, he relocated to Vilnius in 1995, where he met and married a Lithuanian woman. The family lived in Palma de Mallorca for two years then moved to Nottinghamshire in 1999, where he took an MA in creative writing at Nottingham Trent University. His first three novels were set in Lithuania, and his most recent, A Child Called Happiness, is about two stories of struggle 115 years apart over a farm in Zimbabwe.

Olesya Yaremchuk is a Ukrainian journalist and writer who specialises in topics of cultural and national identity, and the frontier. She has studied at universities in Lviv and Vienna, and worked as a journalist in Ukraine and Germany. Since 2015 she has been working on Our Others, a project on national minorities in Ukraine in the online magazine The Ukrainians. She has published an important book based on this project, Our Others: Stories of Ukrainian Diversity. Her writing has been translated into Czech, German and English.

A message from Lviv UNESCO City of Literature:

Kindly hosted in Lviv by Iryna Starvoyt, and the Nottingham host is Ross Bradshaw.

Tickets: £3 if you can afford it, free if you can’t. It is essential to book via Eventbrite.

See all six events on Eventbrite here