Still City: A Diary of an Invasion

Longlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize 2025
Longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection 2025
Highly Commended in the Forward Prizes 2024

Still City, Oksana Maksymchuk's debut in English, reflects
life in the wake of extreme and unpredictable violence. Inevitably,
there are dramatic shifts in perspective: this diary of an invasion
recreates the mood and tone of the context within which a poet's
imagination must make sense of the change.

Drawing on various sources, including social media, the news, witness
accounts, recorded oral histories, photographs, drone video footage,
intercepted communication, and official documents, Maksymchuk tells the
shared experience. The book began 'as a poetic journal I started keeping
in my hometown of Lviv, Ukraine in 2021–22. In the months leading up to
the full-scale invasion, my writing has been registering how ways of
living, thinking, and feeling have been changing due to the anticipation
of a catastrophe, imbuing the everyday rituals with the sense of
finality and precarity. While we, as a family and a community, made
preparations for air strikes, as well as nuclear, chemical, and
biological warfare, our relationships transformed, as did our sense of
time, fate, and personhood.'