On April 17, The Old Lion Publishing House announced the start of pre-sale of the first poetry collection of Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina. She died as a result of the Russian attack on Kramatorsk in June last year.
The collection is called “Svidchennya” ["Testimony"]. Victoria began writing poems from this book at the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Russia on the territory of Ukraine, and the last one was written a few days before her death.
Victoriaʼs husband Oleksandr Amelin and close friends Halyna Kruk, Sofia Chelyak, Kateryna Mikhalitsina, Maryana Savka, Olena Huseynova, Svitlana Povalyaeva, Oksana Lutsyshina and Tetyana Teren worked on arranging the collection.
"We formed this collection by gathering the archives of Victoria. It was most important for us to guess how Victoria would have seen this collection, and not to interfere with her texts as much as possible. Because her voice is heard, and our job was to give it a body," says Sofia Chelyak.
All characters and stories in the collection are real. Victoria wrote the first poems from the collection about her friends, about the women and children whom she helped to evacuate.
From the summer of 2022, after Victoria went on her first trip with the Truth Hounds organization, the poems began to feature the voices of people she met as a documenter of war crimes.
As noted in the publishing house, all profits from the first edition will go to the New York Literary Festival, which was founded by Amelina.
You can pre-order the book via the link. It will be available from June 6.
- Victoria Amelina is a Ukrainian writer, the author of the novels "The November Syndrome, or Homo Compatiens", "Home for Home" and books for children, the founder of the New York Literary Festival in Donetsk region. She was a volunteer, public figure. Since the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war, she made volunteer trips to the de-occupied territories of Ukraine.