Oleksii Chupa

I’m going to write a novel about modern Ukrainian society. That astonished me from the first year of Russian aggression, how our people manage not to notice a few millions of refugees from Donbas region and to think that this war is nothing but a TV-show.

The Vienna Writer-in-Residence 2020 became the most extreme of those I visited. I just made up my mind and was proclaimed the COVID-19 pandemic, so we urgently had to pack up and evacuate home. It would look like total failure, but, oddly enough, this situation is fully embedded in the concept of the text I planned to start in Vienna (but anyway started a bit later, inspired by that short time spent at the Residence - a novel about how the ordinary world crashes in one moment, about what it means to be under siege, what it means be cut off from the world for an unknown period, how exactly this affects the human mental state. Because we are our hopes and plans for the future What is left of us when the city is threaded by invisible but deadly threat, and any of your hopes and plans can be convenient tomorrow?
In fact, little by little I am writing this novel, studying how the world reacts to the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as how people are changing in this new environment.
Separately, I want to point out that the Residence made a very pleasant impression on me - people, great accommodation, all conditions for a quiet writing, and all this in the heart of one of the best cities in the world!
It’s really lovely and I hope the Fate will give me the second chance.