"The war changes the landscape of our lives"

How much does the war change your everyday working life – is working at all possible under these circumstances?? 

You can not get used to the war, but you can somehow try to find your place in this chaos. That is what we are trying to do now - to find our place and our new rhythm in this war.

We wake up and fall asleep checking the news. We write dozens of emails, connect with different people, we write interviews and talk via zoom. Now we try to work actively and get back to work with books. When we hear the air raid siren we hide and wait. It can last for a few hours or ten minutes, you never know. Last time we heard the explosions really loudly and there were blackouts, but luckily no one got hurt this time and electricity was fixed within a few hours. While we wait for the end of the alert siren we read, draw or talk to our friends while they are also in a bomb shelter.

Can you interrupt this frozen, restricted life?

We really need physical activity, which gives a good kick of energy. So we continue the repair of our studio. It is a very good symbol for us - we build and restore something while Russia destroys everything. And also this work gives us a feeling that we control something, because constant feeling of helplessness to stop this horror is really tough.

And how much do current events influence the topics for your books?

First weeks we could not draw at all, it was hard to focus. But now we have to continue our work and deal with all the multitasking. There are international projects that we are involved in, so they move forward. We also work with our new book.

Does the war force you to deal with the content in an artistic way?

Since Russia started the war in Ukraine in 2014 we created or illustrated a few books connected to the topic of war. We created a picture book "How War changed Rondo", created a series of 25 illustrations for the novel of Ernest Hemingway "Farewell to Arms", illustrations for the poetry book of Maryana Savka "Optics of God" and a few others. So we deal with the topic of war during these years. 

We are sure we will create a new project about war, but it should be symbolic and “told” with the new visual language, with the right words. But first we have to understand the scale of changes which the war will bring, how it will change the landscape of our lives. 

What is the contact like with your publishers abroad?

We have strong contacts with many of our publishers around the world. We have amazing contact with our German publisher, our dear friends Gerstenberg. They tremendously supported us, supporting Ukraine and Ukrainian publishers and we were all deeply touched by their immense support and help. We work closely with our friends publishers in the USA, the UK, Japan, Korea, Denmark, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Slovakia, Czech Republic and almost every other European country and many more countries from different parts of the world. All these amazing people doing their best to support Ukrainians, spread the word about our brave fight and about russian war crimes.

What book projects are you both working on at the moment?

We continue work with our new non fiction book, which we started last year some months before the war. It is a book about communication, connections and interactions between people, animals, plants. And already after the full scale war started three months ago we decided to pay special attention in this book to the loneliness and to the huge need to communicate, to be closer to others. We all need to feel that we are not alone in this war. And we are very grateful to our friends around the world, to our community that we are definitely not alone. Thank you for standing with us!