CREECA and the Russian Flagship Program invites UW-Madison-affiliated students and faculty to a conversation with Elena Kostyuchenko (in Russian), to be held at 4:00 PM on October 30, 2026, in 206 Ingraham Hall.Please register to attend
There will be Pizza!
Elena Kostyuchenko is a Russian journalist. She was born in Yaroslavl, Russia, in 1987, and she spent seventeen years reporting for Novaya Gazeta, Russia’s last major independent newspaper, until it was shut down in the spring of 2022 in response to her reporting from Ukraine after the start of the Russian invasion. She is the author of two books published in Russian, Unwanted on Probation and We Have to Live Here, and is the recipient of the European Press Prize, the Free Media Award, and the Paul Khlebnikov Prize. In 2024-2025, she was a Fellow at The Nieman Foundation for Journalism, Harvard University.
Elena Kostyuchenko’s book I Love Russia: Reporting from a Lost Country (2023) — “a haunting book of rare courage,” as Clarissa Ward, CNN chief international correspondent, called it — earned several distinctions, including a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker and TIME, and the Pushkin House Book Prize (London, U.K.). It brings together reportage from the past fifteen years with personal essays, assembling a kaleidoscopic narrative that Kostyuchenko understands may be the last work from her homeland that she’ll publish for a long time — perhaps ever. In March 2022, as a correspondent for Novaya Gazeta, Kostyuchenko crossed the border into Ukraine to cover the war. Her 2022 war reportages and a few other pieces, in English translation, can be found here: https://www.nplusonemag.com/authors/kostyuchenkoelena/
On October 30, 2026, Elena Kostyuchenko will be a panelist at the conference 2026: Renewing Our Courage: Journalism Ethics in Troubled Times organized by the Center for Journalism Ethics at UW-Madison: https://ethics.sjmc.wisc.edu/2026-renewing-our-courage-journalism-ethics-in-troubled-times/.