Victoria Amelina

It is with infinite regret that we share the news that Victoria Amelina, who had been due to join us in September as a Resident at the Institute, died on July 1 of injuries she sustained as the result of the Russian shelling of a restaurant in Kramatorsk on 27 June. Our thoughts go out at this time to her family and her friends.

Victoria Amelina was a Ukrainian novelist, essayist, poet, and human rights activist based in Kyiv. She won the Joseph Conrad Literature Prize for her prose works, including the novels Dom's Dream Kingdom and Fall Syndrome, and was a finalist for the European Union Prize for Literature and the UN Women in Arts Award.

Victoria was a founder of the New York Literature Festival, which took place in a village called New York in the Bakhmut area, in the Donetsk region. Since 2022 she had been collaborating with Ukrainian NGOs, including Truth Hounds and the Center for Civil Liberties, to document war crimes and advocate for accountability for the international crimes committed in Ukraine. Recently, she was working on a non-fiction project, Looking at Women Looking at War: War and Justice Diary.