Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina awarded Orwell Prize posthumously

Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina, who was killed in 2023 during a Russian attack on Kramatorsk, has been posthumously awarded the British Orwell Prize for her book Looking at Women, Looking at War.

Source: The Orwell Prize announcement on X (Twitter)

Details: "An unforgettable picture of the human consequences of war," Chair of Judges Kim Darroch commented on Amelina’s work.

Amelina received the award in the Political Writing category. Her English-language book, published in the UK in February 2025 by William Collins with a foreword by Margaret Atwood, combines diary entries, interviews, reports from war crime sites and poetry.

Amelina announced the book at the 29th BookForum in Lviv, describing it as a work about Ukrainian women who "in different ways try to achieve justice or even retribution".

She did not complete the book before her death in 2023 from injuries sustained in Kramatorsk.

The book features women including a Truth Hounds documentarian with the alias Casanova, reporters Yevheniia Podobna and Vira Kuryko-Ahienko, human rights defenders Oleksandra Matviychuk, Larysa Denysenko, and Kateryna Rashevska, historian Olena Stiazhkina, writer Svitlana Povaliaieva, Kharkiv Literary Museum director Tetiana Pylypchuk, librarian Yuliia Kakulia-Danyliuk, lawyer and soldier Yevheniia Zakrevska, activist Iryna Dovhan, and poet Iryna Novytska, ex-wife of murdered writer Volodymyr Vakulenko. Photographs were taken by Yuliia Kochetova.

Background: The Orwell Prize recognises political literature in four categories: fiction, non-fiction, journalism and exposing Britain’s social issues, honouring works that align with George Orwell’s aim to "turn political literature into art".

Victoria Amelina, a Ukrainian writer and public figure, was a laureate of the Joseph Conrad-Korzeniowski Literary Prize and a nominee for the Angelus Central European Literary Award. After the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion, she paused fiction writing to join Truth Hounds, a watchdog documenting human rights abuses and war crimes committed in Ukraine, and participated in Ukrainian PEN charity trips to liberated territories.

Amelina was injured during a Russian missile attack on a Kramatorsk café on 27 June 2023, while accompanying a delegation of Colombian writers and journalists. Despite the efforts of doctors, she died on 1 July 2023.

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