Living No Lie: A Russian Diary 2021 – 2024

Living No Lie is the diary of a gay Russian volunteer for the Ukrainian war relief effort. It combines a personal account of living under an authoritarian regime in Putin’s Russia with the heart-rending stories of Ukrainian war refugees, in an attempt to find unity–and family–in the midst of global conflict. From the author of Spring in Siberia , the autobiographical coming-of-age novel endorsed by Ocean Vuong, Edmund White, and Stephen Fry. The author directs all profits from the sales of this book to refugees of the war on Ukraine. ADVANCE PRAISE from Michael Bronski (author, A Queer History of the United States , Professor of Practice in Media and Activism at Harvard): “”Artem Mozgovoy’s Living No Lie: A Russian Diary 2021—2024 is a heart wrenching account of the author’s leaving Russia to live his life as an openly gay man. In his new homeland of Belgium, after war breaks out, he volunteers to work in a center for Ukrainian refugees. This is a story of exile–from homeland, from family, from freedom, from humanity–and it strikes at the heart of who each of us is today in a world torn apart by hatred and fear. Mozgovoy’s clinical eye for the details of the material world–a decaying Soviet era building, a deserted dark street in Brussels–is matched by his enormous ability to convey the deepest, often most frightening emotions. His writing can shatter the soul. To say this is a brilliant meditation on exile–which it is–ignores the cold blooded fact that the harsh realities with which his diary grapples are lived everyday by people trapped in the maelstrom of history.”” Artem Mozgovoy is a prize-winning writer and journalist who fled his country when Russia began legalising its persecution of gay people. His autobiographical coming-of-age novel Spring in Siberia was out in 2023 with Red Hen Press (US) and endorsed by Ocean Vuong, Stephen Fry, and Edmund White. — ASIN: 2960364104 | ISBN13: 9782960364101 | ISBN-13: 978-2960364101