Book by Ukrainian Writer Killed in Russian Bombing Wins Orwell Prize
The book "War & Justice Diary: Looking at Women Looking at War" by Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina has won The Orwell Prize 2025.
The Gaze reports on this with reference to the award's post on social media X.
The book won in the Political Writing category.
“An unforgettable picture of the human consequences of war,” said jury chair Kim Darroch about the book.
He added that Amelina “brings to her narrative the sharpness of a journalist and the artistry of a natural writer, making her a true heir to George Orwell.”
According to The Guardian, the book — Amelina's only non-fiction work — documents the resistance of Ukrainian women to the Russian invasion, with the book's protagonists including a soldier, a human rights activist, and a librarian.
Amelina was announced as the winner at a ceremony in London on Wednesday evening, Orwell's birthday. Amelina's husband accepted the award on her behalf, and the prize money — £3,000 — will go toward developing the festival she started in New York, Donetsk Oblast — the New York Literary Festival.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Amelina was working on a novel, but soon switched to poetry and non-fiction. Shortly before her death, she sent the latest version of her book, Diary of War and Justice, to a friend.
After her death, a group of writers, together with her husband, compiled the material, which they estimated to be about 60% of what Amelina had planned, into a reader-friendly version, adding footnotes and occasionally inserting material from earlier drafts.
The book was published in the spring of 2025 by one of the world's oldest publishing houses, Macmillan Publishers St. Martin's Press.
Victoria Amelina is a writer and public figure, a member of PEN Ukraine, and the founder of the New York Literary Festival in the village of New York in the Bakhmut district of Donetsk region. In the year of the full-scale invasion, Amelina joined the field researchers of Russian war crimes in the Truth Hounds team, an organization that has been documenting human rights violations in Ukraine and other countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia for the past eight years.
Amelina died on the evening of July 1 at the Mechnikov Hospital in Dnipro as a result of injuries sustained during a Russian missile strike on a restaurant in Kramatorsk on June 27, 2023. At the time, she was in Kramatorsk with a delegation of Colombian journalists and writers.