LOOKING AT WOMEN, LOOKING AT WAR by Victoria Amelia - Spotlight

 

A new book follows photographer, Victoria Amelia documenting the War in Ukraine. LOOKING AT WOMEN, LOOKING AT WAR  (StMartinsPress) is a diary of war and justice. 

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. Now 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. When a 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.

“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 Jan. 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.

Amelina's life was cut short, at thirty-seven when a Russian missile exploded in a popular restaurant area frequented by journalists. Days later she died from head injuries suffered.