Victoria Amelina (1 January 1986 – 1 July 2023) was a Ukrainian novelist, essayist, poet, and human rights activist. Victoria died on 1 July 2023 as a result of injuries sustained in a Russian missile strike on a pizza restaurant in Kramatorsk. She was 37 years old.

Victoria was the author of two novels about contemporary Ukraine, DOM’S DREAM KINGDOM and FALL SYNDROME, as well as two children’s books. Victoria’s prose and poems have been translated into Polish, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Hungarian, German, Croatian and English. She was a winner of the Joseph Conrad Literary Award (2021), and a finalist for the European Union Prize for Literature finalist (2019) and Lviv UNESCO City of Literature Prize (2018).

Victoria had a master’s degree in Computer Science and worked on cutting-edge projects in the high-tech industry for ten years before becoming a writer. In 2019/2020 Victoria lived in the US and travelled extensively.

Victoria wrote both in Ukrainian and English. Her essays appeared in Irish Times, Dublin Review of Books, and Eurozine. In 2021, she founded a literary festival in the Donetsk region, Ukraine. 

In 2022, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Victoria Amelina trained with the NGO Truth Hounds and worked as a war crimes researcher in Ukraine. At the time of her death, she was working on a non-fiction book that describes her experiences and those of her colleagues, entitled LOOKING AT WOMEN LOOKING AT WAR: WAR & JUSTICE DIARY. The book was published in February 2025 by William Collins (UK) and St. Martin’s Press (US) and has been translated into 15 languages. It has been shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2025.