Amelina dies in Ukraine bombing aged 37

Award-winning Ukrainian author Victoria Amelina has died from injuries suffered during the bombing of Kramatorsk last month. 

The 37-year-old died on Sunday (1st July) from wounds sustained during the missile strike of Kramatorsk, eastern Ukraine, on 27th June. Human rights activists have called the attack a war crime, according to the BBC.

Amelina had been documenting Russian war crimes with the human rights initiative Truth Hounds and was in Kramatorsk with a group of Colombian writers and journalists, PEN Ukraine said. As the delegation had dinner at the Ria Lounge restaurant, Russia launched a missile attack on this restaurant, and Amelina was severely injured. 

Gvantsa Jobava, International Publishers Association (IPA) vice-president wrote in a social media post: “I met Victoria Amelina, the Ukrainian writer and activist, in Norway... We spent a very nice evening together, we talked about everything, about Georgia and Ukraine, about war, victory and peace, about life and death, about her activism during the war. We became friends, she became very dear to me. We met each other again recently in Kyiv, at the Book Arsenal festival. I was so happy to meet her again, she was everywhere, taking part in different events and panel discussions.  

“She cared about everything not only around Ukraine, but about Georgia as well. Then she hugged me and left. During all this days we were hoping that miracle will happen, but it didn’t... Now I realised that by going to Ukraine I was given a chance to hug this talanted, brave, dear woman one last time. My heart is totally broken.” 

Amelina had attended the 2023 IPA Prix Voltaire ceremony in May to receive the IPA Prix Voltaire Special Award last month on behalf of the late children’s author and poet Volodymyr Vakulenko who was abducted and killed by Russian troops in the city of Izyum soon after the invasion. She had then taken the prize from Norway to Vakulenko’s parents in Kapytolivka. The IPA announced that the special award is now also dedicated to Amelina’s memory. 

Her novel Dom’s Dream Kingdom (Old Lion Publishers in Lviv) was published in 2017 and shortlisted for the Unesco city of literature prize and the European Union Prize for Literature, according to PEN. Her poems, prose and essays have been translated into English, German, Polish and other languages.

She had recently won a grant to write a non-fiction book, War & Justice Diary: Looking at Women Looking at War, and in 2021 she received the Joseph Conrad-Korzeniowski Literature Prize, according to PEN Ukraine. The same year, she founded the New York Literature Festival in the town of New York in the Bakhmut region of eastern Ukraine. 

Amelina was born on 1986 in Lviv and initially worked in IT before becoming a novelist and children’s author.