A decade ago I was in Paris and attended the Salon du Livre, France's largest book fair, which brings together publishers from all over the world.

I was there officially to present the French translation of my biography of Clarice Lispector, but I had a secret mission as well.

I wanted to meet Ukrainian publishers so that Lispector could also be read in their country of birth.

Exactly one hundred years ago, she fled Ukraine with her family, using the same routes and roads that desperate Ukrainian refugees take today to leave the country.

I didn't know of any Ukrainian publishers at the time.

I wasn't a literary agent either, and I had no idea how to do it.

I just felt it mattered, and when I finally located a lonely middle-aged Ukrainian publisher named Anetta Antonenko, I tried to tell her my story.

Clarice Lispector was the greatest modern writer in Brazil, I told her.

She is so brilliant, so magnetic, that her compatriots refer to her as the "princess of the Portuguese language".

And this proud symbol of Brazilian culture was born in Ukraine.

"It is a matter of national pride, of righting a historical wrong, to bring her back to her native land," I told her.

"I know how to shoot and I know how to heal"

We must have seemed like an odd couple.

I'm almost twice as tall as Anetta.

Neither she nor I could express ourselves very well in the other's language.

Yet, in that wondrous way that sometimes happens between people who are meant to understand one another, we understood one another.

A little later, Anetta Antonenko began to publish Clarice's work in her publishing house.

She has since published three of her novels and is working on a Ukrainian edition of The Passion According to GH.

She also publishes works by Bataille, Lorca and Borges.

And this week of all days she was expecting a translation of my Susan Sontag biography.

A few days ago she wrote that her father was a soldier and her mother was a doctor.

“I know how to shoot and I know how to heal.” Today, this friendly, well-educated woman sits in her apartment in a once-quiet neighborhood just two miles from Kiev Central Station.

"I'm in my apartment," she said when we communicated via Whatsapp this weekend.

"I have my two cats with me and I don't want to hide.

I refuse to be afraid in my own country.

That's why I work as much as I can.

Work offers protection.”

“We have always been the nation that read the most books”

She has food for ten to fifteen days - and cat food for a month.

And like millions of Ukrainian civilians, she has a gun.

Her father taught her to shoot when she was twenty, and although she turned sixty in January, she is ready to use the gun in an emergency.

"I'm not afraid of fighting.

But I believe that words are an essential part of our victory.

I have received a lot of moral support from publishers, agencies, authors, translators, embassies and foundations.

I'm doing everything I can to get the word out about our situation.”