Looking at Women Looking at War

WINNER, THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING
WITH A FOREWORD BY MARGARET ATWOOD
A USA TODAY BESTSELLER

“Remarkable…powerful, eloquently testifying to the horrific consequences of this conflict.” —New York Times Book Review

“Unsparing and impossible-to-forget… its shape and urgency dictated by war and by its author’s shining life so abruptly shredded into night.” —The Telegraph

“An effortlessly compelling voice, simultaneously intimate and universal.” —Financial Times

NOW A USA TODAY BESTSELLER

WITH A FOREWORD BY MARGARET ATWOOD

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.

Author Biography

Victoria Amelina was killed by a Russian missile in July, 2023. She was an award-winning Ukrainian novelist, essayist, poet, and human rights activist whose prose and poems have been translated into many languages. In 2019/2020 she lived and traveled extensively in the US. She wrote both in Ukrainian and English, and her essays have appeared in Irish Times, Dublin Review of Books, and Eurozine. Her 2025 book, Looking at Women, Looking at War, with a Foreword by Margaret Atwood, was a USA Today bestseller and won The Orwell Prize for Political Writing; it is on the Long-list for the 2025 Moore Prize for Human Rights Writing.