On October 2, 2019, the Awards Ceremony of the European Union Prize for Literature took place at BOZAR, Brussels.

This year for the first time Ukraine was represented among 14 winners of the EU Prize for Literature. The award went to Ukrainian writer Haska Shyyan and her winning novel “Behind the back”.

Finnish author Sofi Oksanen addressed the EU Prize for Literature Awards Ceremony with an impressive keynote speech about the role of literature and writers in democratic societies, including in spreading the truth about the history of Ukraine, Russian information war, crimes of the Soviet regime and efforts to destroy Ukrainian language, culture and identity

 Moreover, Sofi Oksanen noted about the famine-genocide of Ukraine, 1932-1933:

"The Holodomor famine in Ukraine between 1932 and 1933 is a genocide which was also denied by the West. According to historian Robert Conquest, it was the first major operation in which the Soviet Union adopted the Big Lie methods launched by Adolf Hitler to influence public opinion beyond its borders. If a lie is big enough, if it's colossal, no one will believe that the truth could be so shamelessly distorted.

The method worked, and it’s still working, since all too often one hears talk of a so-called controversy concerning the facts of the Holodomor. Russia has also continued to exert pressure on other countries when it comes to the Holodomor: it does not want other countries to recognise the Holodomor as a genocide. But in order to understand Russia's current policies we must study Ukrainian history and the Holodomor. The way Russia is using gas as a weapon is nothing new. Ukraine's energy resources have simply taken the place once held by its low-cost grain, which Stalin, now enthusiastically rehabilitated in Russia, had the idea of using as a political weapon. It gave him a say in the West, but he also needed the currency it provided to buy the machinery for Soviet industry. Otherwise it would not have been possible to achieve his over-ambitious five-year plan. So Ukraine had grain, and plenty of it, but the Ukrainians were not allowed to have it.

(…)

Starving the Ukrainians was a way of making the peasants who opposed collectivisation fall in line, and it’s worth remembering that Ukrainian language was mostly spoken in the countryside, and therefore the Ukrainian speakers were the ones who got punished worst during the famine and the collectivisation. Holodomar served to undermine Ukrainian national identity. Hunger was a weapon that not only starved human bodies. It was a weapon that expanded to starve the language and culture. The agenda was the same as in the case of the deportations: the national backbone was broken, resistance was crushed, morality was beaten down as people were encouraged to betray each other for a piece of bread. Genocide is not only the destruction of physical individuals, but also of cultures and nations. The Sovietisation of Ukraine achieved through deliberate famine and political class persecution continued after the Holodomor. The Ukrainian language was discriminated against, the history of Ukraine was not taught, the history of the famine was not learned in schools. It became a secret, oral heritage”.

Extracts from the keynote speech by Sofi Oksanen at the Awards ceremony of the European Union Prize for Literature, 2019.