Looking at Women Looking at War: A War and Justice Diary

by Victoria Amelina

🏆 Winner of the 2025 Orwell Prize for Political Writing

This is a memoir about a war not yet ended, which could have undermined its power. Yet from the opening chapter to the close, the power of the image of women looking at war is relentless and necessary. Amelina is setting off for a holiday with her young son as the war comes chasing after her and everyone else in Ukraine. She is finishing a funding application for a literary festival whilst standing in the security queue at the airport, checking her phone for news and “thinking about my new gun and why I, a nearsighted bookworm, decided to buy it”. Thus a beautifully written book, technically unfinished but with a tragic completeness, unfolds.

Recommendations from our site

“Victoria Amelina was a successful Ukrainian novelist, and founder of a book festival, living in the Donetsk region of Eastern Ukraine. The Russian invasion stripped all of this away overnight. Rather than fleeing the country, she travelled it, supporting humanitarian projects, helping others evacuate, researching war crimes, and chronicling the harrowing, sometimes surreal, challenges and experiences of living in a war zone. Then, on 27 June 2023, she was in a pizzeria in Kramatorsk when it was hit by a Russian missile. Sixty-four were injured and thirteen killed. Victoria was amongst them. Her book, Looking at Women, Looking at War, put together after her death by a group of friends and colleagues, is unavoidably fragmentary – a collection of diary entries, interviews, audio files, notes and drafts. But it is all the more powerful for its episodic structure, conjuring up the reality of daily life when mere survival is an achievement. She brings to her narrative the acuity of a journalist and the artistry of a born writer. The result is an unforgettable picture of the human consequences of war—Kim Darroch, chair of the judging panel” Read more...

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