“Cappy and the Whale” is a moving story of an eight-year-old boy named “Cappy” who is diagnosed with leukemia. One day, the hero notices a whale swimming in the air outside his window. The disease prevents him from doing the things that every eight-year-old should be able to do, so when the whale offers the boy a shared adventure, Cappy accepts the offer and sets off on a ride through the sky with his new, extraordinary friend! “Cappy and the Whale” is an extraordinary, warm story about friendship, awakening imagination and curiosity, the need to build safe worlds, and about hope.

Kateryna Babkina (born 1985 in Ivano-Frankivsk) is one of the most popular Ukrainian writers of the middle generation. Prose writer, poet, screenwriter, columnist, translator. Her work has been translated into English, Czech, French, Spanish, German, Swedish, Romanian, Russian and Hebrew. She made her debut in Poland with a collection of short stories entitled “Happy Naked People” published by Workshops of Culture in Lublin in 2016. For the novel “Grandfather danced the best” she received the ANGELUS 2021 Central European Literary Award and the ANGELUS 2021 Readers’ Award named after Natalia Gorbanevskaya. After the start of Russia’s full-scale aggression against Ukraine, she moved to Wrocław, where she took part in a literary residency. She currently lives in the UK. This year, for the first time, Workshops of Culture in Lublin are publishing her children’s book for Polish readers.

Participants: Kateryna Babkina – author, Bohdan Zadura – translator, moderator: Tomasz Sikora, interpreter: Andrij Saweneć