The Vancouver Writers Fest and Upstart & Crow Literary Arts Studio welcomed Ukraine’s most celebrated writer, Andrey Kurkov, to discuss his work with international correspondent for The Globe and Mail, Nathan VanderKlippe. Diary of an Invasion is a searing dispatch from the heart of Kyiv during the first year of the Russian assault. Kurkov’s award-winning novel, Grey Bees, is a dark foreshadowing of the devastation in the eastern part of Ukraine in which only two villagers remain in a village bombed to smithereens.