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‘A tragic completeness': Ukrainian novelist awarded Orwell prize posthumously for unfinished final book
Two years after she was killed in a Russian missile strike, Victoria Amelina, a Ukrainian novelist who became a war crimes researcher after Russia's full-scale invasion of her country, was posthumously awarded the Orwell Prize for Political Writing for her unfinished work, Looking at Women, Looking at War: A War and Justice Diary from Ukraine.
The book, released by HarperCollins with a foreword by Margaret Atwood, was described by prize judges as 'technically unfinished but with a tragic completeness.' Atwood, writing in the introduction, calls the war 'Russia's appalling and brutal campaign to annihilate Ukraine,' and reflects that 'in the middle of a war, there is little past or future … there is only the white heat of the moment.'
It is in this white heat that Amelina's final book lives, between being witness of the violence, preserving fragments of memory, and brief moments of calm and camaraderie .
Born in Lviv in 1986, Amelina trained as a computer scientist before turning to literature. Her debut novel The Fall Syndrome was published in 2014, and her follow-up, Dom's Dream Kingdom (2017), established her as one of Ukraine's leading young literary voices. She also wrote children's books, ran literary festivals, and was raising her young son when Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.
At the time, Amelina was at work on a novel. Within weeks, she had set it aside. 'The quest for justice has turned me from a novelist and mother to a war crimes reporter,' she would later write. She joined Truth Hounds, a Ukrainian human rights organisation, and began documenting war crimes: interviewing witnesses, photographing the ruins of cultural sites, and writing.
The book she eventually began was part memoir and part chronicle and traced the lives of Ukrainian women who fell prey to wartime brutality. Among them were Evgenia, a lawyer-turned-soldier; Oleksandra Matviichuk, who helped document war crimes and won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2022; and Yulia, a librarian who helped expose the abduction and murder of a children's book author.
The manuscript Amelina left behind — roughly 60 percent complete — included essays, field notes, and fragments, some with no more than a title. The first chapter, titled The Shell Hole in the Fairy Tale, opens with the author preparing for a vacation to Egypt. Her newly purchased handgun looks out of place lying near colourful dresses and swimsuits. 'A full-scale Russian invasion has been postponed for the last eight years since 2014,' she writes, still half-believing that war might be avoided.
'Amelina is setting off for a holiday with her young son as the war comes chasing after her and everyone else in Ukraine,' the Orwell Foundation noted in its citation. 'She is finishing a funding application for a literary festival while standing in the airport security line, checking the news and thinking about her new gun.'
On the night of June 27, 2023, Amelina was dining with a group of international writers in Kramatorsk, a city in the embattled Donetsk region, when a Russian cruise missile struck the restaurant. She suffered critical head injuries and died four days later. She was 37.
Her husband, Alex Amelin, accepted the £3,000 award at a ceremony in London this week, held on George Orwell's birthday. The prize money will support the New York Literary Festival in Donetsk, which Amelina founded. The town, ironically named after the American city, now lies close to the front lines.
The Orwell Prize, awarded annually by the Orwell Foundation, honours work that exemplifies George Orwell's values of integrity, decency, and truth-telling in political writing. It seeks to fulfill Orwell's enduring ambition 'to make political writing into an art.'
