Talking Europe: The UCL European Institute podcast

This episode of Talking Europe focuses on a unique literary project that underscores the enduring cultural ties between the UK and the rest of the European continent: the interactive, online European Literary Map of London devised by University College London's European Institute. Highlighting London’s relevance for European culture and in particular for European writers. Dr Uta Staiger Director of the UCL European Institute and curator of the project discusses the project and the wider relationship of London and European Literature with European authors Ciara Broderick (Ireland), Nisrine Mbarki (The Netherlands), Domas Raibys (Lithuania) and Iryna Shuvalova (Ukraine) and her UCL colleague, Lucy Shackleton.

In this episode of our podcast 'Talking Europe', Hayley Anderson, one of our 2024-25 Student Ambassadors, sits down with Ciara Broderick, the UCL 2025 European Literary Map of London Writer in Residence. Their conversation delves into Ciara’s journey as a writer, her experiences settling into London, and the creative process behind her upcoming short story for the Literary Map. Together, they explore themes of writing, language, and identity—examining how the Irish language shapes both Ciara’s work and her sense of self. This episode was produced in collaboration with the UCL Platform for Linguistic and Epistemic Justice (PLEJ). PLEJ is a research centre based at UCL's School of Slavonic and East European Studies. Its focus is to place socio-cultural linguistic research front and centre among the interdisciplinary areas of enquiry with social impact at SSEES, UCL, and beyond. About our guests Ciara Broderick Irish prose and poetry writer Ciara Broderick is our 24/25 Writer in Residence. Ciara's work has been published in several Irish and international journals and in 2025 her first novel was selected as a winner of the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair. During her four-week residency in London, Ciara has been based at UCL Faculty of Arts & Humanities and engaged closely with UCL academics and students, participated in various related events, and pursued her own writing. Hayley Anderson Hayley is one of the Student Ambassadors at the UCL Europe Institute for 2024/25. She is a fourth-year European Social and Political Studies student. With her specialism in Hungarian and History, she has focussed her research on the experiences and identities of communities in Eastern Slovakia and the wider Central East Europe region.

How can we speak and write about war? What role does silence play in this process? What does it mean for people and places to survive war? We discussed these questions and more with two brilliant writers, Maria Tumarkin and Yuliya Musakovska, whose works have interrogated war and trauma in uncompromisingly honest and perceptive ways. For more information, visit our webpage: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/european-institute/ukraine-shelf-episode-4-writing-war-and-trauma

In this episode, we explore the industrial regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. From 2014 until 2022, this was where Russia focused its war of aggression against Ukraine, killing and uprooting thousands of people. Russia claimed these regions were culturally and historically Russian, but history, and the people of these regions themselves, tell a different story: the majority consider themselves Ukrainian, and they overwhelmingly voted for Ukrainian independence in 1991. To get a better understanding of this region’s complex identities and its history as a resource-rich region on the edge of empire, we spoke to Professor Victoria Donovan of the University of St Andrews about her book Life in Spite of Everything (Daunt Books, 2025) and to historian and novelist Olena Stiazhkina about her novel Cecil the Lion Had to Die (Harvard, 2024). More here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/european-institute/ukraine-shelf-episode-3-eastern-ukraine-olena-stiazhkina-and-victoria-donovan

Russia has attempted to repress and destroy Ukrainian statehood and identity over two centuries. In this episode, we trace the historical roots of Russia’s current aggression to imperial myths from the early 19th century, and look at how these myths have resurfaced repeatedly over time. We explore the most recent wave of violence through the tragic story of Victoria Amelina, a Ukrainian writer who was killed in a Russian missile attack in 2023. The books under discussion are Eugene Finkel’s Intent to Destroy: Russia’s Two Hundred Year Quest to Dominate Ukraine (Basic Books, 2024) and Victoria Amelina’s Looking at Women Looking at War (Harper Collins, 2025). See more: www.ucl.ac.uk/european-institute…lture-under-attack