Julian Evans on Odesa and Ukraine

Julian Evans first visited the city of Odesa on a boat journey down the Dnipro River in 1994.

He fell in love with its crumbling baroque beauty, and with its distinct personality as a self-contained world: part stage set and part port city on the make, a place where the boundaries between the actual and imaginary were continually blurring.

He also fell in love with a local woman, and for nearly thirty years, her city became his city, too.

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Evans went back with a donated pickup truck and boxes of tourniquets to do his part for his adopted home.

His eyewitness account of life under bombardment by Russian missiles, and the struggles of combat medics and drone operators on the front line, weaves memoir with history and literature to give us a haunting portrait of a country struggling against terrible odds for survival.

Julian Evans is the author of Undefeatable: Odesa in Love and War, Semi-Invisible Man: The Life of Norman Lewis and Transit of Venus, a book about his travels in the Pacific. His work has appeared in the Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, Daily Telegraph and other publications.

You can read more about him on his website, and follow him on Instagram and Twitter.

We spoke about the city of Odesa, his visits to front line combat zones, and what Russia’s war means for Europe.

These are the books we mentioned in the podcast:

• Undefeatable: Odesa in Love and War

We also mentioned:

• Odessa Stories by Isaac Babel