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“Victoria Amelina was a celebrated Ukrainian author who turned her distinct and powerful voice to investigate and expose war crimes after the full-scale military invasion of Ukraine in February 2022,” said Polina Sadovskaya, Eurasia director at PEN America. “She brought a literary sensibility to her work and her elegant prose described, with forensic precision, the devastating impact of these human rights violations on the lives of Ukrainians.”
Amelina was born January 1, 1986, in Lviv. In 2014, she published her first novel, The November Syndrome, or Homo Compatiens, which was shortlisted for the Ukrainian Valeriy Shevchuk Prize.
She went on to write two award-winning children’s books, Somebody, or Waterheart and another novel, Storie-e-es of Eka the Excavator. In 2017, her novel, Dom’s Dream Kingdom, received national and international accolades — including the UNESCO City of Literature Prize and the European Union Prize for Literature.
A popular young writer, her fiction and essays have been translated into many languages, including English, Polish, Italian, German, Croatian, Dutch, Czech, and Hungarian.
In 2021, she founded the New York Literature Festival, which takes place in a small town called New York in the Donetsk region of Ukraine.
Since the start of the invasion, Amelina devoted herself to documenting Russian war crimes in eastern Ukraine, PEN America said. In Kapytolivka, near Izium, she discovered the diary of Volodymyr Vakulenko, a Ukrainian writer killed by the Russians.
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In a powerful essay, Amelina described the plight of Soviet-era conformists caught in the crossfire of the 2014 Russian invasion by focusing on the sad tale of Hanna, an elderly woman evacuated from the Donbas to the relative security of western Ukraine. Until her death, Hanna expresses her desire to go back home, even after it is explained to her that there is a Russian tank possibly parked in her garden.
“I did what I could: I’m a writer, and writing the truth is perhaps my best way of defending Hanna’s garden. I could not protect anyone from the Russian artillery, so I tried to take up arms against their lies,” Amelina wrote.
She also began writing her first work of English non-fiction shortly before her death. In War and Justice Diary: Looking at Women Looking at War, Amelina recounts stories of Ukrainian women collecting evidence of Russian war crimes. It is expected to be published soon, according to PEN Ukraine.
AP
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