Serhii Plokhy Audiobooks

Harvard's foremost historian of Ukraine takes on the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl

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Who is Serhii Plokhy?

Serhii Plokhy is a historian and author, born in 1957, and one of the most authoritative academic voices writing on the history of Ukraine. He holds the Mykhailo Hrushevsky professorship of Ukrainian history at Harvard University, and from 2013 to 2025 he also directed the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute – a role that placed him at the very centre of Ukrainian studies in the English-speaking world.

That pedigree matters. Plokhy is not a journalist parachuted into a fashionable subject; he is a career scholar, and the confidence and precision that come with decades of academic work are exactly what readers borrow when they pick up one of his books.

Serhii Plokhy in audiobooks

He appears in our catalogue with Chernobyl, his account of the nuclear disaster, and it is precisely the kind of serious narrative history that thrives in audio: a scholar’s command of the material carried along by a story with real momentum. For UK listeners who want their history rigorous rather than sensationalised, Plokhy is a safe pair of hands.

It rewards sustained listening, too. He writes to be understood rather than to impress, so long stretches of motorway or commute pass quickly while the detail quietly accumulates – the mark of an academic who never forgot that history is, first of all, a story.