Love, grieving, intimacy and enduring war: what is the role now for books and writers in Ukraine? | Charlotte Higgins

The Lviv BookForum was vibrant this year, but still there is the backdrop of conflict and the need to find a place for storytelling

Last year's Lviv BookForum, a literary festival in the elegant western Ukrainian city, was mostly an online affair, held in a basement lecture theatre that might double up, if needed, as a bomb shelter. By contrast, this year's edition had about 150 live events, with many available online, too.

Some were so popular that audiences, many of them in their 20s and 30s, filled the aisles and crowded at the back of the main venue, a handsome 16th-century powder tower" that once formed part of the city's arsenal. Publishers were selling books at stalls in the soft autumn sunshine. There was an evening of poetry and live music in the city's marionette theatre. There was laughter, there was drinking, there were old friends to see and new ones to make.