A visitor reads a book at a book fair during a Publishers Forum in Lviv, Ukraine, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. A regional council in western Ukraine had passed a motion to ban all Russian-language books, films and songs in the region.
British writer and translator Steve Komarnyckyj remembers visiting Ukraine during the Soviet era, and searching in vain for Ukrainian books to read. "They wrote that Ukraine is full of Nazis. They wrote that Ukraine doesn't serve to be a separate country. It was really horrible," she says. But the industry has suffered mightily since then. Many books in Ukraine are sold through book shops and supermarkets, and retail sales plummeted due to the Covid pandemic.