We had a moving and insightful event here at Stanfords on Wednesday evening hearing all about How Good It Is I Have No Fear of Dying with Lieutenant Yulia Mykytenko and her fight for Ukraine and author and journalist Lara Marlowe.
Lara Marlowe first interviewed Lieutenant Mykytenko in 2023, for an article about women in the Ukrainian military for The Irish Times. Marlowe described Mykytenko as ‘one of the most extraordinary people I have interviewed in 42 years of journalism’. How Good It Is I Have No Fear of Dying offers a rare, first-hand insight into the lives of Ukrainian soldiers defending their homeland against Russian aggression and highlights the contribution of women to the Ukrainian military.
It is a compelling story of a country at war and of a fearless woman fighting for its survival.
“As long as there are women like Mykytenko in the world, human society will be okay. The combination of courage and love in a single person is an ancient story and one that we must hear over and over again to know that it’s possible. And Marlowe’s prose is so powerful and compelling that I was at a loss as to when to put the book down and do something else for a while. It may well be one of the best and most important books to come out of this brutal war that Russia has inflicted on Ukraine.”
Sebastian Junger, New York Times bestselling author of In My Time of Dying
How Good It Is I have No Fear of Dying is available now for £20
About the speakers:
Lara Marlowe was born in California and studied French at UCLA and the Sorbonne, then International Relations at Oxford. She started her career as an associate producer with CBS’s 60 Minutes programme, then shifted to print media with the Financial Times and TIME Magazine. She has reported for a host of broadcast and print media and was a staff foreign correspondent, based in Paris and Washington, for the Irish Times from 1996 until 2023. Marlowe lived in Beirut for eight years and has reported from throughout the Middle East. She makes her permanent home in Paris, where she has covered five French presidents. For her contribution to Franco-Irish relations she was made Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur in 2006. Marlowe is the author of Love in a Time of War (Head of Zeus, 2021), Painted with Words (2011) and The Things I’ve Seen (2010).
Lieutenant Yulia Mykytenko was born in Kyiv in 1995. Her childhood was marked by the economic crisis of the 1990s and her parents’ divorce. As a student at Ukraine’s most prestigious university, Kyiv-Mohyla, she became convinced that Ukraine’s future must be with Europe rather than Russia. With fellow students, she co-founded the ‘female squad’ of the 16th regiment of the Self-Defence Force during the 2013/14 Euromaidan protests. The following year, she fell in love with Illia Serbin, a soldier. They married and on graduating from Kyiv-Mohyla in 2016, she too joined the Ukrainian army. She was just a few miles away when her husband was killed by Russian shellfire in 2018. After a brief return to civilian life, Mykytenko rejoined the army on the first day of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, 24 February 2022. Her platoon is stationed on the frontline near Lyman, Donbas. Mykytenko has endured the loss of her husband, father and brothers-in-arms, yet she is determined to fight on.