Victoria Amelina

JANUARY 1, 1986 — JULY 1, 2023

37 YEARS, WRITER, JOURNALIST

Air raid siren across the entire country

It's as if every time they lead everyone to execution,

Yet only one is struck,

Usually the one standing at the edge,

Today it's not you, all-clear.

Victoria Amelina

 

On June 27, 2023, Victoria was in Kramatorsk, accompanying a delegation of Colombian journalists and writers. As the group dined at the Ria Lounge restaurant, a missile struck the building. While all other guests survived, Victoria suffered critical injuries. Doctors fought to save her, but the damage was too severe. Three days later, she passed away at the Ilya Mechnikov Hospital in Dnipro.

“The sentences become astonishingly short, punctuation an unnecessary luxury, and the plot muddles; yet, each word fills with profound meaning—that's what war does to you,” Victoria once remarked in an interview.

In the summer of 2022, Victoria joined the human rights organization Truth Hounds and became a documentarian of Russian war crimes. She frequently visited frontline areas, collected testimonies from victims in liberated towns, and was working on her non-fiction book War and Justice Diary: Looking at Women Looking at War in English.

Born in Lviv, Victoria’s first novel, „The November Syndrome, or Homo Compatiens”, was shortlisted in the top ten of the 2014 LitAccent rating. Her books received numerous literary prizes and were translated into several languages. She was also the recipient of the Joseph Conrad Award.

Shortly before her death, Victoria shared a photograph on X (formerly Twitter) of a destroyed building, with the caption: “I am a Ukrainian writer. One would think I’d be photographing books, art, and my little son. Instead, I document Russia’s war crimes and listen to artillery, not poems. Why?”

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