Victoria Amelina’s book won the Orwell prize

The book “Looking at Women Looking at War” by the late Ukrainian writer and public figure Victoria Amelina has won the Orwell prize for political writing. The winner was announced in London on June 25, 2025, the birthday of the British author George Orwell.

The prize worth £3,000 was received by Amelina’s husband Oleksandr Amelin. He noted that the prize money would be allocated to support the New York Literary Festival his late wife founded in 2021 and held in New York, the village in Donetsk oblast.

“Amelina ‘brings to her narrative the acuity of a journalist and the artistry of a born writer, making her a true heir of George Orwell,’ judging chair Kim Darroch said.

“Looking at Women Looking at War” contains a series of stories about Ukrainian women who helped carry out or are otherwise involved in the fight against the Russian occupiers.

“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,” reads the annotation to the book.

Initially, the book was meant to be a collection of reports about Ukrainian women documenting Russian crimes during occupation, but later the structure became more complex. The book includes diary entries, essays, historical studies, interview fragments, and poetry. The main characters of the book are: Truth Hounds documentarian with the call sign “Casanova,” journalists and reporters Yevheniya Podobna and Vira Kuriko-Ahiyenko, human rights defenders Oleksandra Matviychuk, Larysa Denysenko, Kateryna Rashevska, historian Olena Stiazhkina, writer Svitlana Povaliaeva, director of the Kharkiv Literary Museum Tetyana Pylypchuk, librarian Yuliya Kakulya-Danyliuk, lawyer and soldier Yevheniya Zakrevska, civic activist Iryna Dovhan, poet and ex-wife of the murdered writer Volodymyr Vakulenko, Iryna Novitska. The photos for the book by Yuliya Kochetova.

“The characters are Ukrainians who, in various ways, strive to achieve justice. A hour-and-a-half public conversation with Philip Sands at BookForum will also be part of the book. Obviously, I am also a character of the book, as are the Ukrainian cities, towns, and villages: Kyiv, Kharkiv, Izium, Balaklia, Kryvyi Rih, Chernihiv, Kapytolivka, Verbivka, Vysokopillia, Novoselivka, and others,” Amelina shared about the upcoming text during the 29th BookForum in Lviv.

Amelina did not finish her book. She died on July 1, 2023, from injuries sustained during a Russian missile strike on a pizza restaurant in Kramatorsk.

Every year, The Orwell Foundation awards prizes for the work which comes closest to George Orwell’s ambition ‘to make political writing into an art’. The prize fund amounts to £3,000. Awards are given in four categories: political nonfiction, political fiction, journalism, and reports on homelessness.

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