Victoria Amelina

Viktoriia Amelina (; ; 1 January 1986 – 1 July 2023), was a Ukrainian novelist and war crimes researcher. She was the author of two novels and a children's book, a winner of the Joseph Conrad Literary Award and a European Union Prize for Literature finalist.

Early life and education Victoria Amelina was born in Lviv. She emigrated to Canada with her father at the age of fourteen, but returned to Ukraine soon after. After completing a degree in computer science in Lviv,

Writing Since her debut novel Синдром листопаду, або Homo Compatiens (The Fall Syndrome, or Homo Compatiens) was published in 2015, Amelina focused on writing. The Fall Syndrome, or Homo Compatiens (foreword by Yurii Izdryk) deals with the events at Maidan in 2014. The novel received several literary awards, and was welcomed by both Ukrainian and foreign critics and scholars.

In 2016, Amelina published a book for children called Хтось, або Водяне серце (Somebody, or Water Heart). (Dom's Dream Kingdom), about the family of a Soviet colonel who lived in Lviv in the 1990s in the former childhood apartment of the Polish Jewish author Stanisław Lem. The novel was short-listed for the LitAkcent literary award in 2017 In 2023, Amelina was offered a UK publishing deal for the book.

Amelina was a member of PEN International. In 2018, she took part in 84th World PEN Congress in India as a delegate from Ukraine and gave a speech about Ukrainian filmmaker and a political prisoner in Russia Oleg Sentsov. In 2021 she received the Joseph Conrad Korzeniowski Literary Prize. That same year, Amelina founded a literature festival in the Donetsk region. She explained her motivations for this, saying ""That's what war leaves you. The sentences are as short as possible, the punctuation a redundant luxury, the plot unclear, but every word carries so much meaning. All this applies to poetry as well as to war". Her prose and poems have been translated into several languages. She planned to use the residency to finish her most recent book, Looking at Women Looking at War, described as "a diary of about a dozen women, including [herself], pursuing justice". Looking at Women Looking at War, her only non-fiction book, was awarded the Orwell Prize for Political Writing in June 2025.

Wartime work After the Russian invasion of Ukraine started, she worked as a war crimes researcher for Truth Hounds, a Ukrainian organization. In May 2023, Vakulenko received a posthumous award from the International Publishers Association, which Amelina accepted on his behalf. Amelina died due to her injuries on 1 July at the Mechnikov Hospital in Dnipro at the age of 37. She was buried in Lviv.

After a school-wide consultation, Amelina was selected to be the promotion patron for the 2025/2026 academic year of the College of Europe.

Awards Order of Merit, 3rd class (22 January 2024, posthumously)