Children’s Books in Wartime
Children’s book publishers in Ukraine are being shut down, losing staff, and facing economic pressure. In Russia, meanwhile, they are increasingly under state control and internationally isolated. On top of that, addressing the war in children’s literature poses an ethical challenge.
Every year on 2 April, International Children’s Book Day is celebrated on the birthday of fairy tale writer Hans Christian Andersen to inspire children’s reading and promote international understanding through children’s books. In Europe, however, since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the annual celebration has taken place in the shadow of a war that has had devasting consequences for children and young people. The war has displaced millions of children from Ukraine, deprived children of their basic rights, and disrupted their education. What is more, the militarisation of childhood has exposed a generation in Russia and Ukraine’s occupied territories to indoctrination in public schools.
Specialist publishers of Ukrainian children’s literature are struggling with the destruction of their printing facilities, offices, and warehouses; economic pressures; disrupted circulation; staff shortages; and, especially, the exodus of their core audience. In Russia, meanwhile, children’s book publishers are experiencing tighter political control, inflated prices, and a lower purchasing power among their audiences, together with isolation from the international book market and irreparable damage to their symbolic status as cultural actors.
Against this background, a research group at Aarhus University in Denmark is investigating how Ukrainian and Russian children’s book publishers operate in wartime and how the resulting books resonate with children’s experiences of war and dislocation.
Dilemmas of publishing war literature for children
In addition to the difficult material conditions for children’s publishing in wartime, Ukrainian publishers interviewed for the study described their ethical and literary dilemmas in presenting the topic of war to young audiences. Some had hesitations about the appropriateness of this subject for children affected by the war and feared retraumatising their young readers; but others found that children themselves were asking adults to explain the situation. Although war defies narrative attempts to make sense of it, authors and illustrators continue to create children’s books about war even during the destruction, both to support children in the present and to witness the ongoing war for future generations.
In Russia’s increasingly polarised political climate, the production of children’s war literature has become a domestic conflict zone, in which a few vocal supporters of the war who are loyal to the regime have called for the publication of more ‘heroic’ children’s books. More often, publishers simply avoid the topic, which is probably more about protecting their commercial brand than about protecting their young readers. One group of publishers, however, believes that professionals who work with children and young people have an obligation to warn of the consequences of war and to insist on publishing works on it – although they now do so increasingly from exile.
A wide spectrum of children’s war literature
The research project has collected a large corpus of war-themed literature for children and young adults. The titles are written in Ukrainian or Russian and were published since Russia’s annexation of Crimea and partial occupation of Ukraine’s Donbas region in 2014. Together, the books document the ongoing war through image- and text-based representations of the often marginalised perspectives of children and young people.
The titles cover a wide spectrum of children’s war literature. The Ukrainian works span instructive texts for very young children, such as mine safety guides; heroic stories with patriotic content; therapeutic literature about the loss of home and family; religious resistance literature about hope, the afterlife, good, and evil; and artistically ambitious picture books, published for an implicit adult audience at international book fairs and festivals.
For example, the publisher Gerstenberg’s German translation of Als der Krieg nach Rondo kam (When War Came to Rondo) by the Lviv-based award-winning author-and-illustrator couple Romana Romanyshyn and Andriy Lesiv has received much public attention. Through the connecting language of pictures, the book tells a universal story of three friends whose peaceful life in a small town is turned upside down by war. They find themselves in a dark and threatening situation until they make an uplifting discovery. The book encourages children that even in seemingly hopeless times, they are not helpless.
Meanwhile, a Russian-language title written under the pseudonyms of Andrei Bulbenko and Marta Kaidanovskaya has also found its way to the German market. The significance of Elektrizität und Himmelsfische (Electricity and Sky Fish), which tells the story of a young girl who flees an unnamed war zone, lies in the way it makes the traumatic consequences of war and displacement tangible for readers. The book was nominated for the German Youth Literature Award in 2025.
Most of the Ukrainian books in the corpus contain direct references to the ongoing war and name sites of atrocities to testify to today’s crimes for future generations. By contrast, the Russian books often use metaphors, allegories, and dystopian or satirical adventure stories to reframe the war, which Russian law calls a ‘special military operation’.
The Russian titles range from overt pro-war propaganda, such as handbooks for patriotic education, via exile literature that covers wartime migration, to explicit anti-war works. The war’s lower visibility in Russian children’s books is also due to Russian publishers’ and authors’ distance from the war zone and their reduced moral legitimacy when it comes to writing about the war.
A childhood beyond the war
Publishers interviewed said that the decision to produce children’s books about the war was not based on demand, since parents would rather have books that distract or protect their children from the realities of war. But some publishers believed that such literature serves as a testimony for future generations who have the benefit of greater distance – in time or space – from the traumatic events depicted. Finally, most publishers emphasised the need to maintain hope and life-affirming narratives in children’s literature to make sure that young readers can imagine a childhood beyond the war.
Birgitte Beck Pristed is an associate professor at the Department of Global Studies at Aarhus University and principal investigator for the research project PUBLISH: Children’s Books in the Russia-Ukraine War.