CBCP x OIW webinar ‘Explorations in Translation for Children’ is a webinar series co-organised by The Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing (University of Reading) in partnership with Outside in World, the organisation dedicated to promoting and exploring world literature and children’s books in translation.
On Thursday 11th December at 5pm (UK time) we will be in conversation with the leaders of the project on Publishing Children’s Books in the Russia-Ukraine War: The Role of Translations.
How do children’s books cross borders in wartime and what happens to them when they do? This joint talk traces the translational lives of war-related titles from commissioning to circulation, and the challenges the publishers meet along the way. Birgitte Beck Pristed introduces the Aarhus University project “PUBLISH: Children’s Books in the Russia-Ukraine War,” examining how Ukrainian and Russian children’s publishers operate under wartime conditions and how the books reflect child readers’ experiences of war and dislocation. In this talk, she focuses on the publishers’ hurdles of bringing books across borders. Drawing on new interviews with Ukrainian publishers, Nadia Pavlyk examines how international support and solidarity are negotiated in practice, and how these transnational networks shape the capacity to produce, translate, and present war-themed children’s literature under fire. Finally, Ekaterina Shatalova shows how, in Russia’s “hybrid” censorship environment, translated children’s books become politically charged objects: the same titles can function as cultural solidarity while being securitised as “threats.” Together, the speakers argue that translation is double-edged – both a vehicle of ethical resistance and a liability within contested information regimes.
To join via MS Teams, please register here.
Speakers:
Birgitte Beck Pristed is Associate Professor at the Department of Global Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark. She is PI of the 2024-2027 research project ‘PUBLISH: Children’s Books in the Russia-Ukraine war,’ https://projects.au.dk/publish.
Nadiia Pavlyk is a researcher on the projects “PUBLISH: Children’s literature in Russia-Ukraine War” (Aarhus University, Denmark) and MSCA4Ukraine “DaR:UA. Dialogues and Reading. Shared Reading for Ukrainian Young People” (2025-2027), https://projects.au.dk/darua. She is a professor at Zhytomyr Ivan Franko State University (Ukraine) and a member of the Pool of European Youth Researchers (PEYR). Her main research areas focus on youth policy, youth work, and non-formal education.
Ekaterina Shatalova is a prolific translator of children’s books and TV shows. She holds a Master’s degree in Victorian Literature from the University of Oxford and an Erasmus Mundus International Master’s degree in Children’s Literature, Media and Culture from the University of Glasgow, University of Tilburg, and Aarhus University (2022). She is currently a PhD fellow at Aarhus University as part of the joint project “PUBLISH: Children’s Books in the Russia-Ukraine War.”
