Looking at Women, Looking at War

Destined to be a classic, a poet's powerful look at the courage of resistance.

When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Victoria Amelina was busy writing a novel, taking part in the country's literary scene, and parenting her son. Then she became someone new: a war crimes researcher and the chronicler of extraordinary women like herself who joined the resistance. These heroines include Evgenia, a prominent lawyer turned soldier, Oleksandra, who documented tens of thousands of war crimes and won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, and Yulia, a librarian who helped uncover the abduction and murder of a children's book author.

Everyone in Ukraine knew that Amelina was documenting the war. She photographed the ruins of schools and cultural centers; she recorded the testimonies of survivors and eyewitnesses to atrocities. And she slowly turned back into a storyteller, writing what would become this book.

On the evening of June 27th, 2023, Amelina and three international writers stopped for dinner in the embattled Donetsk region. Whena Russian cruise missile hit the restaurant, Amelina suffered grievous head injuries, and lost consciousness. She died on July 1st. She was thirty-seven. She left behind an incredible account of the ravages of war and the cost of resistance. Honest, intimate, and wry, this book will be celebrated as a classic.

Review

‘Rare, powerful and affecting, a work of principle and courage by a truly brilliant and inspiring writer’

PHILIPPE SANDS

Praise for Victoria Amelina:

‘Victoria’s moral clarity, determination, and love of country impressed me greatly. She now joins the ranks of those whose lives have been cut short by war, their truncated careers the source of what-if musings forever afterward. In Victoria’s case, I feel certain that her legacy, and her words, will endure, infusing a contemporary, combustive element to the Ukrainians’ growing sense of identity and nationhood’

Jon Lee Anderson, The New Yorker

‘Victoria Amelina had a way of walking straight into your heart and making herself at home there’

Lia Mills, The Dublin Review of Books

‘What impressed me was [Amelia's] seeming ability to gaze steadily into the abyss and not fall into despair, perhaps because she possessed a marvellous sense of humour’

Christopher Merrill, author of Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars

‘Amelina touched so many of us with her profound capacity for empathy and observation… For its great courage and significance, her difficult work in this realm brings to my mind the acts of resistance figures like Jan Karski and Witold Pilecki, who similarly took great risks to collect and convey information about Nazi German crimes to the Western Allies during the Second World War’

Peter Balakian, author of Black Dog of Fate

‘Victoria has completed her worldly task, leaving us the legacy of her example: of grace under pressure, as Hemingway defined courage, and of the abiding importance of her mission’

Askold Melnyczuk, award-winning author of The Man Who Would Not Bow

About the Author

Victoria Amelina was killed by a Russian missile in July, 2023. She was an award-winning Ukrainian novelist, essayist, poet, and human rights activist whose prose and poems have been translated into many languages. In 2019/2020 she lived and traveled extensively in the US. She wrote both in Ukrainian and English, and her essays have appeared in Irish Times, Dublin Review of Books, and Eurozine.