The last week saw the terrible news of the death of the writer Victoria Amelina from injuries sustained in the Russian missile attack on a restaurant in Kramatorsk a few days beforehand.  Amelina was a celebrated writer and prominent activist and investigator – and the finder of the murdered writer Volodymyr Vakulenko’s hidden war diary.

The UL has some of Amelina’s work.  We have her first major novel, Syndrom lystopadu, abo, Homo Compatiens (2014) and two anthologies to which she contributed essays: Viĭna 2022 (2023) and Mosty zamistʹ stin, abo Shcho obʹi︠e︡dnui︠e︡ ukraïnt︠s︡iv? (2022).  Sadly we didn’t manage to get her 2017 Dim dli︠a︡ doma before it went out of print; we hope that an institutional ebook copy will appear at some point that we can buy.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Amelina – famous at that point primarily as a novelist and children’s writer – had been working with the organisation Truth Hounds to investigate Russian war crimes.  She wrote and did a great deal of public speaking about the war and about literature.  In her memory, the journalist Olga Tokariuk has put together a list of Amelina’s work translated into English.  Hopefully, Amelina’s literary legacy will be preserved in further books in Ukrainian and in English translation – we will certainly look out for them.

It was in her investigation work that Amelina found the buried war diary of author and children’s writer Volodymyr Vakulenko, beaten and killed by Russians in Izium.  You can read more about the diary and the discovery in this English-language Chytomo article.  Vakulenko’s prose and poetry books have long been out of print, but we will buy examples – and of course his war diary when that is published – when we can.

Mel Bach