The award-winning Ukrainian novelist, essayist and war crimes researcher Victoria Amelina, who was wounded last week in a Russian missile strike on a restaurant, has died from her injuries.
Tributes to both Amelina’s activism and her writing poured in from across the worlds of literature and politics, after PEN Ukraine announced she had died in a hospital in Dnipro, surrounded by friends and family.
Amelina, 37, won the Joseph Conrad literary prize in 2021 for work’s including Dom’s Dream Kingdom and had been nominated for other major awards including the European Union Prize for Literature.
She largely set aside her writing after the full-scale Russian invasion of 2022, to focus on documenting war crimes and working with children on or near the frontline.
“Victoria Amelina was one of kindest and most charitable Ukrainian writers who did much more for others than for herself,” said the novelist Andrey Kurkov on Twitter. “She founded two literary festivals, in New York (Donbas) and in Kramatorsk, where her life was stopped by a Russian missile.”
Her work included unearthing the diary of Volodymyr Vakulenko, a fellow writer who was illegally detained and killed by Russian soldiers in the city of Izium in early 2022. The diary, which was buried in his garden, served as a real-time document of Russian atrocities.
Human rights groups say the attack that killed Amelina, on a popular restaurant crowded with civilians in eastern Kramatorsk, was also a war crime. Thirteen people died and more than 60 were injured.
The writer was travelling with Colombian journalists and writers to document war crimes and build support for Ukraine in the global south.
She was acutely aware of the risks she was taking. Her work forced her into frequent, close inspection of the destructive power of Russian weapons. “We are, you could say, obsessed about our freedom, and we’re ready to die for it. Russians cannot forgive us for that,” she said seven months before she was killed.
She also warned that an invading army that denied Ukraine’s right to exist would target artists and writers. There was a bleak historical precedent in the “Executed Renaissance” generation of intellectuals killed in the Soviet Union a century ago.
“Now there is a real threat that Russians will successfully execute another generation of Ukrainian culture – this time by missiles and bombs,” she wrote in a prescient article. A foreword she wrote for Vakulenko’s diary places his death in the context of those earlier killings.
Amelina put her commitment to her country and its most vulnerable people ahead of her personal safety, training to gather evidence of war crimes that could be used in future prosecutions. She also built networks with foreign journalists and intellectuals to raise support for Ukraine internationally.
Before her death, she had been working on a non-fiction book about Ukrainian women’s experience of the invasion, Looking at Women Looking at War: War and Justice Diary, which will be published in English, together with Dom’s Dream Kingdom.
She had been awarded a Columbia University fellowship in Paris, and planned to move there in the autumn with her 12 year-old son.
Born in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv in 1986, Amelina spent time in Canada with her father as a child. She studied computer science at university and spent a decade working in the tech industry before publishing her first novel in 2015 and building a career in literature.
Her work always mixed the political and the artistic. In 2021, she founded a literary festival in New York, Donetsk, a small town that since 2014 has been near the frontline. It was a typical example of her playful spirit, eye for capturing attention and commitment to celebrating and supporting Ukrainian defiance and grassroots culture.
“When I founded New York literature festival in a small village called New York in the Donbas, I was, of course, being ironic. After all, irony is what makes literature great. Self-irony made the village of New York a fantastic place. Russians have no self-irony. They are so serious about themselves,” she wrote on Twitter, after Russian forces bombed the festival site.
“But Ukrainians will survive, laugh and make literature festivals, not war – in all possible New Yorks. I promise.”
PEN Ukraine promised to keep those festivals going. “For us, Victoria’s friends and colleagues, it is very important the cultural initiatives set up by her could last. Very soon we will share with you information about the ways you can support her life’s work.”
