A posthumous book by Victoria Amelina, the Ukrainian author who was killed in a Russian missile strike in her home country last year, will be published in 2025, the Associated Press reports.
St. Martin’s will publish Amelina’s Looking at Women Looking at War: A War and Justice Diary, which features a foreword by Margaret Atwood,next winter. The press called it “a poet’s powerful look at the courage of resistance” that is “destined to be a classic.”
Amelina, a Lviv native, made her literary debut in 2014 with a novel, The Fall Syndrome, or Homo Compatiens, and followed that up two years later with another, Dom’s Dream Kingdom.
After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, she became a war crimes investigator with the human rights group Truth Hounds. On June 27, 2023, she was injured when a Russian missile hit a pizza restaurant in the Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk; she died from her wounds shortly after. Amelina was 37.
She was working on Looking at Women Looking at War, based on her interviews with 11 other war crimes investigators, at the time of her death. The book was finished by a group of people including her widower, Oleksandr Amelin.
“She left behind an incredible account of the ravages of war and the cost of resistance,” St. Martin’s says. “Honest, intimate, and wry, this book will be celebrated as a classic.”
Looking at Women Looking at War is slated for publication on Feb. 18, 2025.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
