Lviv BookForum 2026

Julian Barnes (United Kingdom) has suggested that Departure(s), published earlier this year, will be his final book. With this novel about love, happiness and farewells, he brings a long literary career into focus, one that established him as a central figure in contemporary English fiction with works such as Flaubert’s Parrot and The Sense of an Ending. Recently awarded the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature, he is a writer with a distinctly European outlook, whose work moves between fiction and reality, irony and melancholy, and a sustained attention to how stories are constructed, remembered, and revised. One of the most important writers of contemporary fiction will be in conversation with Oleksandr Mykhed.

Mathias Énard (France) has built his work around the circulation of people, languages, and wars across overlapping historical and geographical spaces. In Zone, a single train journey becomes an inventory of modern violence from the Mediterranean to the Middle East, while Compass —winner of the Prix Goncourt— traces centuries of cultural exchange between Europe and the East through music, literature, and travel. His most recent novel, The Deserters, returns to war through two separated timelines, following figures who step away from systems of violence and the structures that sustain them.