Victoria Amelina

Victoria Amelina (1986–2023) was a Ukrainian novelist and war crimes documentarian who became one of the most eloquent literary voices of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Born in Lviv, she was the author of the novels The Rock and the Sea (2014) and Dom's Dream Kingdom (2017), and had published a children's book and poetry before the full-scale invasion of February 2022 changed the direction of her work. After the invasion, Amelina stopped writing fiction and began documenting Russian war crimes in Ukraine as part of the Truth Hounds organisation, accompanying fact-finding missions to liberated Ukrainian territories. She also recovered and preserved the war diary of the poet Volodymyr Vakulenko, who was killed by Russian forces in the Kharkiv region. Her final book Looking at Women, Looking at War (2025), published posthumously, collects her essays, journalism, and reflections on war, literature, and the role of the writer in times of catastrophe. Amelina was critically injured in a Russian missile strike on a restaurant in Kramatorsk in June 2023 while she was hosting international writers on a cultural solidarity visit, and died from her injuries on July 1, 2023. Looking at Women, Looking at War won the Orwell Prize for Political Writing posthumously in 2025, and her death was mourned as a profound loss to Ukrainian and world literature.