You Don’t Know What War Is: The Diary of a Young Girl from Ukraine by Yeva Skalietska

Yeva Skalietska, a Ukrainian teenager, was the winner of the 2023 Special Prize for Young Authors. Her diary, You Don't Know What War Is, details the earliest days of the Russian invasion of her hometown of Kharkiv through to her escape with her family to Ireland. She is interviewed by Bidisha Mamata on behalf of the Christopher G. Moore Foundation. 

Yeva’s moving diary, written daily as she lived through the first 12 days after the Russian invasion, poignantly illustrates how the war changed her young life forever.  Writing for children her own age, Yeva’s book exhibits a maturity of thought and writing ability that is far beyond her years, displaying compelling insight into what conflict is like through the eyes of a child.  It is a story the world needs to hear and is essential reading for adults and older children alike. 

Nury Turkel -  No Escape: The True Story of China’s Genocide of the Uyghurs

Nury Turkel was born in a ‘re-education’ camp in China at the height of the Cultural Revolution. He spent the first several months of his life in captivity with his mother, who was beaten and starved while pregnant with him, whilst his father served a penal sentence in an agricultural labour camp. Following this traumatic start – and not without a heavy dose of good fortune – he was later able to travel to the US for his undergraduate studies in 1995 and was granted asylum in the country in 1998 where, as a lawyer, he is now a tireless and renowned activist for the plight of his people.

Part memoir, part call-to-action, No Escape will be the first major book to tell the story of the Chinese government’s terrible oppression of the Uyghur people from the inside, detailing the labour camps, ethnic and religious oppression, forced sterilisation of women and the surveillance tech that have made Xinjiang – in the words of one Uyghur who managed to flee – ‘a police surveillance state unlike any the world has ever known’.