The Ukrainian author died on July 1, after being injured on June 27 in an attack by Russian forces in Kramatorsk, Ukraine. The writer had put fiction aside to dedicate herself to documenting the war months before. Ella amelina she is the 13th victim of a missile that she detonated in the pizzeria where she was.
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Victoria Amelina, who had been hovering between life and death for days, finally died on Saturday, June 1, at the Mechnikov hospital in Dnipro. The news was given by the PEN Ukraine organization, of which the writer was a part.
He died as a result of one of the deadliest Russian attacks in the war in Ukraine in recent days and which, together with Amelina’s, has claimed 13 lives. The author was in a pizzeria when a missile struck the restaurant, inflicting head injuries.
Along with Amelina, in the Ría restaurant, were also the Colombian writer Héctor Abad Faciolince, his compatriot, the former peace commissioner Sergio Jaramillo, and the reporter -also Colombian- Catalina Gómez Ángel, special envoy of France 24 en Español to Ukraine for coverage of the conflict.
None of them, with whom Amelina was sitting at the table, suffered serious injuries. After the attack, Abad Faciolince regretted what happened. “This was a testimonial trip and, suddenly, it has become a tragic trip in which our colleague Victoria Amelina is between life and death,” he said in an interview with the newspaper The country.
Witnesses to the tragedy cited by PEN Ukraine and Truth Hounds have denounced that the missile that the Russian troops used in the attack was of the Iskander type, a high-precision weapon. “They knew for sure that they were shooting in a place where there was a large concentration of civilians,” the entity said on its website.
A documentation on the work of women who have narrated the war
Amelina was born in 1986 in Lviv. Her studies had been in computer technologies, but before leaving her degree, in 2015, she had published her first book in 2014: ‘The November Syndrome or Homo Compatiens’. Then, another work of her authorship, ‘Someone or a watery heart’, her first book for children, was shortlisted for the LitAccent of the Year-2017 awards, the UNESCO City of Literature Award and the Literature Award European.
In 2021, she became the winner of the Joseph Konrad-Kozhenovsky Literary Prize. That same year she founded the New York Literary Festival in the Bakhmut district of the Donetsk region.
After the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, Amelina joined the human rights organization Truth Hounds in order to document war crimes in territories vacated after the conflict. Shortly before the attack, Amelina had portrayed herself as a documentarian.
“It’s me in this photo. I’m a Ukrainian writer. I have portraits of great Ukrainian poets in my bag. I look like I should be taking photos of books, art and my young son. But I document Russia’s war crimes and I hear the sound of the bombings”.
It’s me in this picture.
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? #StopRussiaNow pic.twitter.com/R50RqacXSZ— Victoria Amelina ?? (@vamelina) June 7, 2022
In one of these territories, in Izium, the writer found the diaries of another colleague, the writer Volodímir Vakulenko, who had buried his manuscripts in his garden during the Russian invasion. Vakulenko, like many other civilians, was killed by Russian troops and his body was found in a common grave.
When Amelina decided to dedicate herself to documenting the war, she simultaneously began working on her first nonfiction book. ‘War and Justice Diary: Looking at Women Looking at War’. In the text, the writer addresses the lives of Ukrainian women who have worked in the coverage of the war.
Her latest legacy as an author will soon be published outside of Ukraine, PEN reports.
with EFE
