Jen was born in Fair Isle, which lies midway between Shetland and Orkney, and began primary school there. Her secondary education was at Lerwick’s Anderson High School, and she recalls that, for the first four years, it wasn’t a happy experience.
Jen Stout, from Shetland, is a journalist and author whose new book, Night Train to Odesa, has won unstinting praise from reviewers. Recently featured as a BBC Radio 4 book of the week, it chronicles her visits to Ukraine and her love of the country and its people. Its humanity is deeply affecting. How did Jen find herself reporting on this brutal conflict, and what challenges did she have to overcome along the way? We discussed these and other questions.
But at the end of her fourth year, she discovered that Russian was being offered as an option in fifth year. What did she find so compelling about it? Partly, it was:
“…the Russian language, which I just fell for, just really loved. I’m not quite sure why. It didn’t have any family connection or anything, but I found it quite easy to learn, I found it very absorbing. I liked the way that the words and the grammar worked. I liked all of it.”
But it was partly also about the teacher, Marion Ockendon:
“She was just very encouraging and took the time to listen to you. Someone that sees that you’ve got a spark, that you’re good at something and that took the time to focus on you and encourage you.”
As Jen wrote in the Yule 2021 edition of the New Shetlander magazine:
“A good teacher can change your life. And teachers who can recognise talent in the sullen and furious kids are particularly important…if I did make it to a class, I’d be at the back, scowling, in the same black hoodie I always wore, surreptitiously listening to Nirvana.”
It wasn’t long before grammatical tables joined the Nirvana posters on her bedroom wall. But she wanted to discover everything there was to know about Russia so, when Mrs Ockendon contemplated a school trip to St Petersburg, she joined her fellow students in fundraising to make the dream come true.
Jen had only been abroad once before, and the ‘staggering’ scale, the grandeur and the colour of the city created vivid impressions, perhaps nowhere more than in the magnificent metro.
But the human connections made an even more powerful impact, especially when combined with the chance to try out her language skills. She recalls experiencing – when ordering tea with lemon – “that rush of joy that comes with speaking and understanding a foreign language.”
Before they packed their bags for the homeward journey, Jen’s mind was made up. She would absorb everything she could about the country and its people. This would be her future.
But it wasn’t going to be easy. Over the next few years, there were some huge frustrations and disappointments over trips that didn’t happen, not least because Jen – unlike her fellow students – simply didn’t have the resources to pursue her goal in a world where bursaries and grants turned out to be less generous than they seemed, and the parental ‘bank’ was the key to so many doors. She graduated with a first in Sociology, not Russian.
Jen found work in journalism, at first for a local newspaper in south-west Scotland, taking up an internship in Leipzig and then producing and reporting for the BBC in Glasgow and Shetland.
She describes BBC Radio Shetland as ‘the best radio station in the world!’ That’s because:
“it’s exactly the sort of journalism that we need, going out and about, being very accountable, providing a service. It features amazing investigations. It always felt like a place where people could pop in and out, which is how it should be. It was very different to working in Pacific Quay, in Glasgow, which did not make me feel like that. Also, it plays that vital, pivotal role in the development of journalists, which is so important and, I think, harder to get now. And the accountability – if you get something wrong, the phone will be ringing the minute you come off air. That’s a very good lesson to learn.”
After serial disappointments, a real prospect of some time in Russia opened up, through the offer of a nine-month, fully funded fellowship. It was delayed by Covid-19, but in mid-November 2021, Jen set off for Moscow.
Given the Russian authorities’ suppression of criticism and the fate of writers such as Anna Politkovskaya, whose work Jen had followed, a journalism fellowship was always going to present challenges. Jen tried to get to grips with the extraordinary scale of Moscow and the mood of Muscovites.
The book opens, strikingly, with her account of an early encounter in a bar with Andrei, a regular customer and an ‘easy-going, quiet type’ whose tales of travel in Russia she’d enjoyed hearing. But as they watched the television news alleging genocide in the Donbas and Nazi control in Ukraine, Jen told Andrei that she might have to leave Russia:
“’Why would you leave?’ he shot back. His voice was suddenly clipped, angry. ‘Russia’s not doing anything. It’s all Ukraine, ramping things up, Ukrainian Nazis.’
I looked at him, astonished, as he went on about how terrible Ukraine was, what a badly run and corrupt country. I eventually interrupted to ask when he’d been there.”
He hadn’t.
“It’s beautiful,” she said. “Nice people”. She told him he was repeating the TV propaganda.
“And his retort, spoken into his pint glass as he avoided my eyes, summed everything up.
‘Yeah, well. Your side is propaganda too.”
These first two pages of Night Train to Odesa give us our first glimpse of Jen’s storytelling: immediate, personal, honest.
She now had to look harder for the “kindness and sincerity” she’d previously known in Russia, but it was still there; and she found, here and there, resistance to the regime. However, Andrei’s take on the unfolding crisis was echoed in the lectures she attended in the first months of the fellowship. “The wild fantasy, the twisting of history, the paranoia and insecurity; it was all there.”
When Russia launched its ‘special military operation’ in late February 2022, Jen and her colleagues had just stepped off a plane in Siberia, on one of the group’s planned excursions. It quickly became clear that the fellowship must end. Jen headed for Vienna, aware of the appalling damage being wrought in Kharkiv, where she had friends.
“I didn’t have a firm plan yet, but I would soon, and I knew it wouldn’t involve going home.”
Folk with connections to our islands are to be found all over the world, as indeed they have been for centuries, thanks to Shetlanders’ seafaring, their past emigrations and a more recent taste for international travel. It was no surprise that Jen’s perspective was global; and in Romania, she was able to draw on advice from Elena, who had previously served as the nurse back in Fair Isle.
That advice led Jen to the Romanian side of the Ukrainian border at Isaccea. She began to report on the flood of refugees for outlets including the BBC and the Scottish Sunday Post, which was particularly supportive, publishing Jen’s absorbing dispatches and demonstrating a deeper commitment to long-form foreign reporting than many other media.
Her account of the refugee exodus is heartbreaking: signs stuck on cars saying DETY (children), in the hope of deterring a Russian sniper, brought her to tears.
“It’s strange what gets you, and when.”
Jen wanted to go into Ukraine, and particularly to Odesa, one of the places she had contacts. There were no easy decisions, apart from the one about not going home.
“I didn’t want to be the idiot journalist who walks unprepared into a war zone, a burden on others, getting in the way.”
But after much deliberation – and even more planning and preparation – she made brief visits with a friend, taking in vital medical supplies. A break in London included conflict training, and then it was back to Romania and, in early April 2022, to Odesa. A month later, she was in Kharkiv and she later went to Dnipro, leaving in early June.
On this and later visits, Jen worked with local volunteers and other journalists, documenting not only the physical destruction and the psychological terror inflicted on these neighbourhoods but also the defiance of her companions:
“I filmed from the car window as Zhenya drove past a pair of Russian army trousers, he and Nataliya cheering at the sight. As explosions cracked sharply nearby, the two belted out a popular punk-folk song, ‘Arta’, about the legendary ability of Ukrainian artillery to blow up Moskali, or Russians.”
Their defiance was reflected, too in the determination to maintain some sort of normality in the face of bombs, missiles and drones. Fundraising concerts and dances were held underground; shelters were set up in the metro.
That sort of solidarity was reflected in the number of non-Ukrainians who lent support to the war effort; people from Canada, Belarus and elsewhere. I asked her what was the thread that connected them.
“They believe in action, doing something. Lots of people do. Most people, quite reasonably, don’t go into a war zone, but some people will. There are lots of reasons for that. But the ideology was quite simple: a fight against fascism and a fight for freedom; and they felt so strongly that they would join the army of a foreign country, which I think is staggering self-sacrifice and bravery. You can’t be neutral in a fight like this. It’s not a civil war, it’s an invasion by an empire.”
But there were rare and contrasting moments of peace, too, beautifully described in passages like this, from Kharkiv:
“The swaying veil of a tall willow tree cast a pool of shadow, its tips just touching the slow, slick surface of the river. I sat cross-legged on the ground, let my eyes follow the darting shapes of swallows around the struts of the bridge. They flew in dizzying patterns around each other, a dance I couldn’t understand but would have watched for hours, little waves of happiness washing through me.”
These passages offer just a taste of Jen Stout’s descriptive range, her ability to capture the moment and, not least of course, her own bravery.
Her encounters with Ukrainians are by turns inspiring, moving, sobering and amusing, but her mastery of language and tone is the thread that holds it all together. However, her photographic reportage is outstanding too, powerfully portraying the horror of the war but also bringing us closer to the people who are at the heart of her story, some of whom did not survive. There’s much more of her photography, including images of Shetland, Russia and Ukraine, on her website.
Had Jen ever imagined herself reporting on war?
“I don’t know if it was a specific goal. It’s hard to remember, isn’t it, what you wanted previously? I always read lots of that kind of reporting. I don’t like sitting still, and I thought I might be good at it, and adapt well.”
As a freelancer, unsupported by news organisations, Jen faced huge challenges in reporting Ukraine, just as she had had to do when trying to secure time in Russia. How hard was it?
“Well, you can get lucky, but it shouldn’t have to rely on luck. But it’s the same in lots of careers, lots of industries. Working on a local paper, working your way up, that’s almost disappeared, because there are so few decent local papers left. And the jobs are so badly paid, and quite click-baity sometimes, too. If you’re trying to get into national papers, you’re competing with people who’ve done multiple unpaid internships, and their parents pay for it. And there’s a lack of jobs, frankly. There are more and more freelancers doing foreign stuff because the foreign budgets on the papers have been cut so much. How many Scottish papers have a foreign correspondent anywhere? They used to have multiple people, and we forget how fast that’s happened, and how devastating that is for us understanding the world.”
However, she did have important assets, including her knowledge of Russian and a firm grasp of history. She had more time than many other journalists to listen to people on the ground, at times becoming involved in helping with humanitarian work.
“An aspect that you don’t often get to do is the deeper reporting where it’s almost like sociology. You’re bringing together your knowledge of the history, the contexts, the politics. What is this society? Why do they speak this language and that language? What happened 40 years ago, 100 years ago, and how does that influence where we are today? The narratives in society – who people really think they are – really interested me. I think it’s really important to have good analysis of that, but it’s also on-the-ground reporting, because this whole war is justified on the basis of the twisting of history, the twisting of narratives. It’s important that we understand those things, and you don’t get to give voice to that in a news report.”
In the light of all that has happened, is Jen’s fascination with Russia and Russian still as strong?
“No. But the Russian language doesn’t belong to Russia. I like the Russian language, just for my own pleasure, and the grammar of it, but it’s very hard to really enjoy it any more. The language is so closely associated with the fascists and with lies. I don’t think ‘fascinated’ is the word I’d use now. I’m interested, because it’s a car crash, and we should learn from this. How does a society degrade like that? I don’t believe in ‘evil’ but I do believe that everyone is capable of appalling things, and it’s the society that we’re in that puts the brakes on us and sets the norms. And those norms became twisted in Russia; it’s about humiliation, it’s about shame, about fear. I think we need to understand that, so that we can be on guard against it in our own society.”
There is so much more to Night Train to Odesa than it’s possible to convey here. The book has been warmly received and the generosity of reviewers is amply justified. Jen’s reading of the book for BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week was also featured on Pick of the Week. The BBC’s Fergal Keane wrote: “Jen Stout is very brave. And she is a storyteller of supreme gifts. I am in awe of her resourcefulness and courage.”
His colleague, Quentin Somerville, praised her reporting as “caring and immediate and this account is honest, intelligent and visceral.” The Kyiv Independent praised her “nuanced picture of Ukrainian society at a pivotal moment in the country’s history” including her recognition of the striking solidarity between hitherto disparate groups – LGBTQ+ and football ‘ultras’. Luke Harding, in the Observer, wrote:
“Her debut book, Night Train to Odesa, is a luminous love letter to an embattled nation, as it resists the Kremlin’s imperial takeover. Volodymyr Zelenskiy does not appear. Its heroes are regular Ukrainians. Stout writes about them with an extraordinary and heartfelt empathy, as they do their best to live amid bombs and to survive.”
The book festivals and events she’s attending all over the UK have been selling out, and that’s really no surprise. Night Train to Odesa is a remarkable testimony and an extraordinary debut.
We must hope that there’s more to come.
Alastair Hamilton
Alastair Hamilton moved to Shetland in 1976. Until he retired, he worked for Shetland Islands Council, latterly as Head of Planning, and was also involved in economic development.