37-year-old poet and novelist, Victoria Amelina became the 13th person to be killed in the missile strike on the Ria Lounge restaurant in Kramatorsk, eastern Ukraine on June 27.
Just a year before, she had written on Twitter; “I’m a Ukrainian writer. I have portraits of great Ukrainian poets on my bag. I look like I should be taking pictures of books, art, and my little son. But I document Russia’s war crimes and listen to the sound of shelling, not poems. Why?”
As writers around the world, pay her tribute, human rights activists called her death a war crime. Her death tells of the tragedy of war, as Olga Tokariuk, a Ukrainian journalist, posted on Twitter in tribute. “So many books unwritten, stories untold, days unlived,”
Victoria Amelina had work in IT from 2005 to 2015. She published her first novel, ‘The November Syndrom’, in 2014, which was successful – listed in the top ten of the best prose books, according to the annual rating of LitAktsent, a Ukrainian literature website. In 2021, she won the Joseph Conrad Korzeniowski Literary Prize, given to a Ukrainian writer under 40, and started a small literature festival in the Donetsk region.
The following year, however, Ms. Amelina joined a human-rights organization, Truth Hounds, to investigate Russian war crimes in areas reclaimed by Ukrainian forces. She also was working on her first nonfiction book in English, about Ukrainian women documenting war crimes, PEN Ukraine said.
Sadly, she didn’t live long enough to see the end of the war, nonetheless, her legacy lives on. However, according to Writers’ Association PEN Ukraine who announced her demise, “In the last days of Victoria’s life, her closest people and friends were with her.”
The tragedy of war on young people is the devastating impact it has on their lives and prospects. War disrupts education, people’s lifestyle, peace, and faith. Leaving youths to question their very existence. However, like Amelina, it is important that we don’t let the war define us but we define it.
