Celebrated writer Artem Chapeye, a father and pacifist who enlisted for the Ukrainian army within days of the Russian invasion, is visiting the University of Chichester on 21 May to discuss his new book Ordinary People Don’t Carry Machine Guns: Thoughts on War (Seven Stories Press, 2025).
Vividly translated by Zenia Tompkins, Ordinary People Don’t Carry Machine Guns: Thoughts on War presents a candid account of Chapeye’s experiences in the army, while also incisively examining the moral and political implications of the war for Ukrainians and the world.
Ordinary People Don’t Carry Machine Guns: Thoughts on War brings together Artem Chapeye’s wartime reflections as a Ukrainian writer, father and soldier who never sought war but found himself compelled to confront it. Written with seriousness, restraint and flashes of dry humour, the book explores the dislocation of ordinary life under invasion: the separation from family, the transformation of civilians into combatants, the uneasy coexistence of fear and duty, and the persistence of tenderness amid violence. Rather than offering a conventional soldier’s memoir, Chapeye gives readers an intimate, unsentimental account of what war does to conscience, language and everyday human bonds.
Artem Chapeye is a Ukrainian author, journalist, translator and serviceman whose work moves between fiction, reportage and personal essay. He is the author of several acclaimed books in Ukrainian and has been shortlisted five times for the BBC Ukraine Book of the Year Award. His writing has appeared in international outlets including The New Yorker, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Die Zeit and Le Monde. Once a committed pacifist, Chapeye joined the Ukrainian Armed Forces after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. His recent work brings together the perspectives of writer, father and soldier, reflecting on war, ordinary life, moral choice and the forms of solidarity that sustain people under extreme pressure.
Artem Chapeye will be in conversation with Dr Daria Mattingly, Lecturer in Contemporary International History (European) at the University of Chichester, whose research interests include perpetrator studies, social and cultural history of the Soviet Union, with an emphasis on Ukraine. Hosted by the Chichester Centre for Critical and Creative Writing and History, Politics and International Relations department, and presented as part of the National Year of Reading, the event is chaired by Dr Naomi Foyle, Reader in Critical Imaginative Writing.
Artem Chapeye’s discussion of Ordinary People Don’t Carry Machine Guns is the fifth Ukrainian literature event at the University of Chichester. The series began in April 2023 with Writing, War, Connection, featuring the university’s digital writer in residence Volodymyr Rafeienko, Guardian foreign correspondent and author Luke Harding, and poet Sasha Dugdale. This was followed by the launch of O Venice!, a short story collection by Borys Fynkelshteyn; the launch of war memoir In Search of Hay for Horses and Lovers by Viacheslav Musiienko; and a reading by Olia Hercules from her memoir Strong Roots: A Ukrainian Family Story through War, Exile and Hope, chaired by Dr Mattingly.
The event is free and will take place at 6-8pm on 21 May in Cloisters on the University of Chichester’s Bishop Otter campus. Signage will be up on the night. A book table will be present and Artem Chapeye will sign copies of Ordinary People Don’t Carry Machine Guns: Thoughts on War.