Victoria Amelina

Viktoriia Yuriivna Amelina (Ukrainian: Вікторія Юріївна Амеліна), later known as Victoria Amelina, was a Ukrainian novelist. 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.Viktoriia Yuriivna Amelina was born in Lviv on 1 January 1986. She emigrated to Canada with her family at the age of fourteen, then returned to Ukraine soon after. After completing a degree in computer science in Lviv, Amelina started her career in IT before becoming a full-time writer and poet in 2015.From 2015, when her first book Синдром листопаду, або Homo Compatiens (The Fall Syndrome: about Homo Compatiens) was published, she dedicated her time solely to writing. Her debut novel deals with the events at Maidan in 2014; the foreword was written by Yurii Izdryk. The novel has received several literary awards, and was welcomed by critics and scholars from Ukraine and wider Europe.In 2016, Amelina published a book for children called Хтось, або водяне серце (Somebody, or Water Heart).In 2017, she published a novel Дім для Дома (Dom's Dream Kingdom) about a family of a Soviet colonel who in the 1990s lived in the former childhood apartment in Lviv of the Polish Jewish author Stanisław Lem. The novel was short-listed for the LitAkcent literary award in 2017. and European Union Prize for Literature in 2019.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 on Ukrainian filmmaker and political prisoner in Russia Oleg Sentsov.In 2022, she started writing poetry as well.[11] Her prose and poems have been translated into numerous other languages.After the Russian invasion of Ukraine started, she worked as a war crimes researcher. In September 2022, while doing research in the Izium region, she uncovered the war diary of fellow Ukrainian writer Volodymyr Vakulenko, who had been killed by the occupying forces.As of 2022, Amelina lived in Kyiv. On 27 June 2023, she was injured during the Russian attack on Kramatorsk while she was dining at RIA Pizza together with Héctor Abad, Sergio Jaramillo and Catalina Gómez. The restaurant was hit by an Iskander missile. Amelina died due to her injuries on 1 July at the Mechnikov Hospital in Dnipro at the age of 37.