The Orwell Prize to Victoria Amelina’s book Looking at Women Looking at War

Victoria Amelina was posthumously awarded the George Orwell Prize for political writing for her book Looking at Women Looking at War.

The winner was announced during the solemn ceremony in London on George Orwell’s birthday, June 25, 2025.

The prize worth £3,000 was received by Amelina’s husband Oleksandr Amelin, who stated 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, a town in the Donetsk region.

Amelina’s never completed English-language book, published in the UK in February 2025 by William Collins with a foreword by Margaret Atwood, features Ukrainian women who document Russian war crimes. This work includes the stories of witnesses to the worst terrors of Russian aggression and occupation. At the same time, it constitutes a powerful argument why Russia’s war against Ukraine has started long before 2014 and why the world should remember Russia’s terror against Ukrainians in the 1930s and 1960s.

"According to Victoria’s archive, the structure of this book had sustained many changes. At the end, she came to documentary writing to combine diary entries, reportage stories of her protagonists, voices of witnesses to war crimes, interviews, essays, historical excursions and poetry. Nevertheless, Victoria determined form the start that the book had to be written in English to globally testify to Russia’s crimes and genocide against Ukrainians that have been lasting for centuries," said Tetyana Teren, cultural manager and initiator of the book.

The Ukrainian premiere presentation of the book took place at the Book Arsenal in June. Earlier, the book was presented in the USA, UK, Sweden, Italy and other countries.

The American edition of the book can be ordered on the Macmillan Publishers St. Martin’s Press website. For the British edition, please apply to the Harper Collins website. The book can also be ordered from Ukrainian online bookstores.

Additional information:

Victoria Amelina was a Ukrainian writer, member of PEN Ukraine and documenter of Russian war crimes with the Truth Hounds organization. On June 27, 2023, Victoria Amelina was severely injured during a rocket attack on Kramatorsk by Russian troops. On that day, the writer was in the city center with a delegation of Colombian journalists and writers. On July 1, 2023, Victoria Amelina passed away in a hospital in Dnipro.

The Orwell Prize recognises political literature in four categories: fiction, non-fiction, journalism and exposing Britain’s social issues, honouring works that align with George Orwell’s aim to "turn political literature into art".