Nothing Bad Has Ever Happened
Edited by Askold Melnyczuk
In honor of Victoria and the contributors to this volume, this tribute is available for free as a PDF, or as an at-cost paperback below.
At thirty-seven, Victoria Amelina was one of Ukraine's most promising young writers, on the verge of a major international career, when Russia's full-scale invasion against Ukraine broke out. On hearing the news, Victoria, who was traveling in Egypt with her ten-year-old son, headed home. After dropping him off with her mother in Krakow, she hurried back to her native Lviv, where she joined her fellow citizens as a full-time volunteer, collecting supplies to aid the soldiers on the front lines. On seeing the horrors of war up close, Victoria decided that wasn't enough, so she signed up with Truth Hounds, a decade-old human rights organization committed to documenting war crimes. She began a new book, War and Justice Diary: Looking at Women Looking at War, in which she wrote about the women who had set aside their own lives in order to document war crimes. On June 27th, Victoria was dining in a restaurant near the front lines when a missile struck and Victoria herself became the victim of a war crime.
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Victoria Amelina
Victoria Amelina was a Ukrainian novelist, essayist, and human rights activist based in Kyiv. She won the Joseph Conrad Literature Prize for her prose works, including the novels Dom’s Dream Kingdom and Fall Syndrome, and was a finalist of the European Union Prize for Literature. Since 2022 Amelina had been collaborating with Ukrainian teams to document russian war crimes and advocate for accountability for the international crimes committed by the russian Federation and its troops. She was tragically killed in a senseless airstrike while eating with colleagues at a restaurant in Kramatorsk, Ukraine.