Join us for a thought provoking evening with Julian Evans and Andrew Harding to discuss Julian's new book Undefeatable, a vivid, first-hand account charting how Odesa’s story is inseparable from Ukraine’s – and more than that, how it has become our story too. 

Date:
Friday 24th of January

Venue:
Max Minerva's, 47 Henleaze Road, BS9 4JU

Time:
Doors at 18:30. Discussion at 19:00. Finish approx 20:00.

Tickets:
£5.50 ticket only
£14.99 ticket with Undefeatable (hardback).
£1 Pay What You Can
(Please only choose the PWYC tickets if you need to, they are limited and intended for those who really need them.)

50p from each ticket goes to Caring In Bristol

You don't need to bring your ticket with you, we will have a list of names on the door. Books will be available to buy on the night. 

ABOUT THE BOOK

Undefeatable

In 1994, Julian Evans discovered the city of Odesa by accident at the end of a ten-day boat journey down the Dnipro river from Kyiv to Crimea. He fell in love with the crumbling, romantic, piecrust-baroque boom town whose port had been a gateway for smugglers, immigrants, divas and poets for 200 years. Returning five years later, he fell in love with one of Odesa’s women, married her in a monastery opposite the railway station, and began a decades-long relationship with both of them.

Profoundly personal, Undefeatable tells the story of Evans’ involvement with the city over nearly thirty years, living in the formerly Jewish and criminal Moldavanka neighbourhood that Isaac Babel made famous in his Odesa Stories, and of his life with his Ukrainian family. But when war comes with Russia’s seizure of Crimea and the Donbas in 2014, he discovers that his wife Natasha’s parents have stopped speaking to each other because they are on opposite sides of the conflict.

Tensions between family and friends become a microcosm of the city’s own continuously shifting, sometimes contradictory atmosphere, intensifying with Putin’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. At this point, Evans decides to go back to live in the city under bombardment, and to the front line, ‘because the feeling you’re not where you belong, it bugs you’.

Timely, singular and dramatic, Undefeatable offers a lover’s portrait of a uniquely human, irrepressible city alongside a tour de force of the personal and political, combining empathy with compelling fresh insights into the history of Russia’s war against Ukraine and its cultural and emotional impacts.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Julian Evans grew up on Australia’s east coast and in the south London suburbs in the 1960s. In the 1990s he left his job in London to island-hop across the Pacific Ocean, a journey that ended five months later at a US nuclear-missile testing range at Kwajalein atoll. The book that resulted, Transit of Venus, has been described as ‘far and away the best book about the Pacific of our times’ and was reissued by Eland Books in 2014. He is also the author of an acclaimed biography of the writer and adventurer Norman Lewis, Semi-invisible Man (2008).

Julian has written and presented radio and TV documentaries, including BBC Radio 3’s 20-part series on the rise of the European novel, The Romantic Road, and the BBC Four film José Saramago: a life of resistance. He is a recipient of the Académie Française Prize for the Advancement of French Literature.

He has also written about the war in Ukraine from the frontline, and his latest book is a personal history of the city of Odesa. He discovered Odesa ‘by accident’ more than twenty-five years ago and, having got married there in a monastery opposite the main train station, has been returning to the city ever since. A dramatic and intimate story of Ukrainian-Russian relations, Undefeatable: Odesa in love and war (2024), is a lover’s portrait of a singularly human, irrepressible city.