Amelina’s passing was announced by the freedom-of-expression group PEN on Sunday night, Polish state news agency PAP reported.
PEN Ukraine wrote on its Facebook page: “With our greatest pain, we inform you that Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina passed away on July 1st in Mechnikov Hospital in Dnipro.”
Amelina, 37, was wounded when a Russian missile destroyed a pizza restaurant in Kramatorsk, in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, on June 27, killing 12 people, including four children, and wounding dozens, Britain’s The Guardian newspaper reported.
She was hospitalised with “multiple skull fractures,” according to doctors treating the injured.
Amelina had been in the city with a delegation of Colombian journalists and writers, The Guardian reported.
Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February last year, Amelina had been working to document Russian war crimes in Ukraine, PEN Ukraine said.
She also worked with children near the front line, the PAP news agency reported.
As part of her work, Amelina discovered the diary of Volodymyr Vakulenko, a fellow author who was illegally detained and killed by Russian soldiers in the eastern city of Izyum at the start of the war, according to PAP.
The diary, which was buried in Vakulenko's garden, served as a real-time documentation of Russian war crimes, The Guardian reported.
Born in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv in 1986, Amelina wrote poems, prose and essays, many of which were translated into English, German, Polish and other languages, PEN Ukraine said.
Her works translated into Polish include the 2017 novel Dom’s Dream Kingdom, which was shortlisted for the 2019 European Union Prize for Literature, according to news outlets.
In 2021, Amelina won the Joseph Conrad Literary Prize, awarded by the Polish Institute in Kyiv, the PAP news agency reported.
Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, launching the largest military campaign in Europe since World War II.
Monday is day 495 of Russia’s war on Ukraine.
(pm/gs)
Source: PAP, Kyiv Post, The Guardian
