The National Library of Ukraine for Children in Kyiv, a city at war for more than a year, is defiantly open, busy and creative. Director Alla Gordiienko describes it as “a place for emotional shelter” where “everything we do starts with a book”. “A book is the best doctor for the soul,” says the librarian’s child psychologist Lada Tsybulska, one of the many roles that make this place special, especially during a war that traumatises Ukraine’s children.
My late mother – Shirley Hughes, beloved author and illustrator of several hundred children’s books and winner of the all-time Kate Greenaway prize for children’s literature – would have found a corner of heaven in this place, were she not a citizen of the real thing. (She died in February 2022, the day after Russia launched its attempted full-scale invasion of Ukraine.) This place is what she dreamed of, and this is why much of Mum’s collection of her own books arrived here last month, why Dogger – who, along with Alfie and Annie Rose, was her most famous character – had to come to Ukraine. And not just to Kyiv: scores of books will move on from here, around the country’s library network, including children’s libraries on the frontline at battered Kherson, to bombarded Mykolaiv, and to Bila Tserkva, 50km south of the capita, to which the library at fallen Mariupol has been evacuated.
