My Women by Yuliia Iliukha, translated by Hanna Leliv, is a powerful and critically acclaimed collection of short fiction that shines a spotlight on the experiences of women during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The world is experiencing the highest number of active conflicts since 1946, with women and girls being disproportionately impacted by war, and excluded from peace decision-making, according to UN Women.
My Women was selected as BBC Book of the Year 2024 in Ukraine and shortlisted for the EBRD Literature Prize 2025. It has been published in the US, France, Italy, Sweden and several other European countries.
Over 1.7 million women and girls have been internally displaced inside Ukraine. Russian forces use gang rapes and assaults at gunpoint as a weapon of war; 65% of energy generation capacity has been destroyed, and the decline in international humanitarian funding means the loss of any kind of psychological counselling or legal aid. The role of women in the Ukrainian Armed Forces has become essential. UN records indicate that 2025 was the deadliest year for women and girls since the invasion began, with over 5,000 confirmed killed and 14,000 injured, although actual numbers are probably much higher. †
“I will remember 9 March 2022 for the rest of my life. On that day, I returned to Kharkiv with a bag full of medicine for the soldiers serving in my husband’s unit. I saw the destroyed downtown and the shelled neighbourhood of Saltivka – and for the first time, I fell asleep without trouble. A few days later, I posted on Facebook, ‘Trusting the Armed Forces of Ukraine – going to bed without underwear!’ I remembered this post last autumn when I felt the inner need to talk about this war through the stories of women.” From the introduction by Yuliia Iliukha
A woman wakes up in the middle of the night “choking on hatred, laughed when her admirers sent her photos of dead enemy soldiers.”
A woman runs out of her house to get milk no longer has a home to return to . . .
A woman buries her son killed by the third shell in the vegetable patch . . .
A woman who had taught the greatness of Russian culture dies buried under the rubble as she sleeps . . .
A woman searches for her husband in a mass grave; identifiable by his birth mark, a missing tooth, a tattoo . . .
A woman returns to the town of her childhood and does not recognize it . . .
A woman cares for abandoned cats in her abandoned block of flats . . .
A woman recognises her son in a video of POWs posted on the enemy Telegram channel . . .
“The woman whose daughter mingled with the occupiers was left all alone with judgements and hatred. She would lock the door of her house and weep quietly, still wondering when she had slipped” . . .
My Women is structured as a series of short, searing snapshots of life experienced by anonymous protagonists who represent the mothers, wives, grandmothers, refugees, soldiers and collaborators enduring the brutal physical and emotional devastation of the invasion. Many have been silenced, many have lost loved ones, many persevere against all reason.
Yuliia Iliukha’s visceral vignettes are succinct and written in a rhythmic poetic way to convey the human, and specifically female, cost of the conflict in Ukraine without being melodramatic or verbose. It is sharp, shrewd and often stinging, and reading it made me reflect not only on the precariousness of women’s lives, but on how trauma ripples through generations. My own mother survived two years outrunning the Gestapo in Occupied France age seventeen and gave birth to my late half brother during the bombardment of Bordeaux; such history is never truly in the past. This book captures that eventuality with devastating clarity.
† Based on reports from UN Women, the World Health Organization, and the International Planned Parenthood Federation.
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