The first time Lara Marlowe interviewed Lieutenant Yulia Mykytenko in Ukraine in 2023, Marlowe realized that the 28-year-old woman army officer was one of the most extraordinary people she had encountered in 42 years of journalism.

Mykytenko was born in Kyiv in July 1995. She co-founded the 'female squad' of the 16th regiment of the Self-Defence Force during the 2013/14 Euromaidan protests, which overthrew the corrupt, pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych. She married Illia Serbin, a soldier, in 2015 and joined the army to serve with him in Donbas the following year. Mykytenko briefly left the army after her husband was killed in a Russian bombardment, but re-enlisted on the first day of the full-scale Russian invasion of 24 February 2022. She commands a 25-man drone unit on the frontline in Donbas.

Drawing from a series of interviews with Mykytenko through the winter of 2023/24, Marlowe paints a searing portrait of life on the frontline and offers insights into Ukraine's past and possible future. How Good It Is I Have No Fear of Dying is a compelling story of a country at war and a fearless woman fighting for its survival.

Lara Marlowe was born in California and studied French at UCLA and the Sorbonne and International Relations at Oxford. She started her career as an associate producer for CBS's 60 Minutes programme in Paris, then moved to Beirut where she worked for eight years for the Financial Times and TIME magazine. She has reported for a host of broadcast and print media, and was a staff foreign correspondent, based in Paris and Washington, for The Irish Times from 1996 to 2023. Marlowe has covered more than a dozen wars and won four press awards. She was made Chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur in 2006 for her contribution to Franco-Irish relations.

Marlowe has completed three long reporting stints in Ukraine for The Irish Times since Russia's invasion on 24 February 2022. She is the author of Love in a Time of War (2021), Painted with Words (2011) and The Things I've Seen (2010).