Ukrainian writer Viktoria Amelina, who died during the Russian strike on Kramatorsk, was posthumously awarded the George Orwell Prize for her book "Looking at Women, Looking at War".
The award announced this in X.
Amelina won the Political Writing category. Judge Kim Darroch described her book as “an unforgettable portrait of the human consequences of war”.
The award ceremony for the prize winners took place on June 25 in London. Amelinaʼs husband, Alexei, accepted the £3,000 award on her behalf, with the prize money going to support the New York Literary Festival, which the writer founded.
“Looking at Women, Looking at War” is Amelina’s unfinished documentary work, with a foreword by Canadian author Margaret Atwood. It combines diary entries, eyewitness accounts, historical excursions, and poetry.
The book is dedicated not only to the war, but also to the women who documented and experienced it. Among the characters are human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Oleksandra Matviychuk, who fights for Russiaʼs international responsibility; Yevhenia Zakrevska, a lawyer who became a soldier; journalist Yevhenia Podobna; "Kazanova" — a war crimes researcher, as well as Yulia Kakulya-Danylyuk — a librarian who kept a diary during the occupation, recording the details of Russian terror.
Who is Victoria Amelina?
Victoria Amelina is a Ukrainian writer, author of the novels "The November Syndrome, or Homo Compatiens", "A House for a House" and books for children, founder of the New York Literary Festival in the Donetsk region. She was a volunteer and public figure.
Since the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war, she has been making volunteer trips to the deoccupied territories of Ukraine. She participated in the human rights initiative and the Ukrainian public organization Thuth Hounds and documented Russian war crimes. It was Viktoria Amelina who dug up the diary of the tortured volunteer and childrenʼs writer Volodymyr Vakulenko, buried in the ground in the deoccupied Kharkiv region, and wrote the foreword to it.
On June 27, 2023, while Viktoria Amelina was at a restaurant in Kramatorsk with a delegation of Colombian journalists and writers, a Russian missile hit the establishment. Amelina later died in hospital from her injuries. In total, 13 people were killed in the strike.
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