Take My Grief Away: Voices from the War in Ukraine (Hardback) - Katerina Gordeeva

'Read this book. Don't put it off until you'll supposedly be strong enough and ready for the reading. If you put it off, you'll find yourself defenseless in the face of evil.'
- Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of Chernobyl Prayer

In the darkest of times, in the midst of it all, a journalist has one single task: to document everything that is happening. It is time to slow down and listen to the voice of a human being.

On 24 February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. Since that day, prize-winning independent journalist Katerina Gordeeva has travelled to refugee centres across Europe to record the human voice and cost of war. Take My Grief Away reveals twenty-four raw, heartbreaking first-person accounts from people united in grief and their first-hand experiences of the brutality and senselessness of war. These twenty-four voices will transform what you think you know about war, grief and human nature.

About the Author

Katerina Gordeeva is an award-winning Russian independent journalist. Until 2012, she worked as a TV reporter for the federal television channel NTV. During her time at NTV, she reported as from the frontlines of Chechnya, Afghanistan, and Iraq as a war correspondent. She later resigned from the channel due to a disagreement with the channel's programming agenda. Katerina left Moscow out of protest in 2014, after Russia's remorseless annexation of Crimea and seizure of part of Eastern Ukraine.

In 2020, she created her own YouTube channel, which today has more than 1.3 million subscribers. To make her documentary film Humans At War, Katerina Gordeeva travelled to dozens of refugee shelters in both Europe and Russia. She collected first-person accounts by interviewing of people with opposing views about their experiences and how the war had drastically changed their lives. This three-hour testimonial film has been viewed by more than 2.5 million people.


In the summer of 2022, Gordeeva was named as one of the top 10 most influential independent journalists in Russia. She is a five-time winner of the Redcollegia Award, an independent prize that recognizes the work of journalists doing ground-breaking work despite government pressure. Gordeeva was awarded the Anna Politkovskaya International Journalism Prize in August in 2022, an award that truly honors her commitment to independent journalism.


In September 2022, the Russian government named Gordeeva a 'foreign agent', a title that is often compared to the term 'enemy of people', which was used in the Soviet Union during the Stalin era.


Katerina's daily work continues to demonstrate her tremendous devotion to unbiased journalism during these very challenging times.