In April, backstage at the soundcheck for the Inner Light Concert for Ukraine in the Vicar Street venue in Dublin, musicians were tuning their instruments and writers were chatting in both English and Ukrainian.
Sitting quietly at the edge of the room sat a young woman in black with long blond hair. She seemed a little detached from everything, so I asked if she was performing later.
“I’m reading some poetry,” she said.
“You’re a poet?”
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“I’m a novelist. But I had to stop writing novels.”
“Why?”
She paused for a moment, then said: “Putin.”
She sat down next to me and my sister-in-law. Her name was Victoria Amelina.
Only later did I learn what an important a writer she was. Her first novel, The November Syndrome, or Homo Compatiens, was shortlisted for the Ukrainian Valeriy Shevchuk Prize and another, Dom’s Dream Kingdom, won the Unesco City of Literature Prize and the European Prize for literature in 2017. She also wrote prize-winning children’s books and organised literary festivals in Kramatorsk and the small Ukrainian village of New York.
She didn’t talk to us about any of that. When her country was invaded, she told us, writing fiction seemed impossible. So, she stopped producing novels and became a war crimes researcher. She travelled to dangerous places in her home country to investigate scenes of torture and murder with the organisation Truth Hounds.
She collected evidence. She interviewed survivors and the relatives of victims. She heard terrible stories. She now used her writing skills to write reports, because she thought that it was important that people know the truth and that these stories were told.
Speaking to my colleague Keith Duggan in a piece about the Russian killing of the writer Volodymyr Vakulenko, she spoke about finding Vakulenko’s lost diaries and said of her research: “There is no guarantee that we will punish all the perpetrators. Some will go on and live their lives after this and pretend to be good husbands and fathers. But it’s very important to come to the survivors – for example, mothers of those who have been tortured and killed, and just listen to them and let them know that somebody cares. That it is not like this happened and nobody asks them about it.”
[ Uncovering the buried diary of an executed Ukrainian writerOpens in new window ]
That day last April, she spoke eloquently, generously and openheartedly about her work (and she did so again later that night on stage) to two strangers in the green room of a music venue. She had been in “a dark place” before we spoke to her, she said, because she had just got a text requesting some things they needed back home.
One request was for cleaning products to clean blood from concrete. She spoke very deliberately in a quiet but clear voice. She wanted us to grasp what was happening in her country. She wanted us to understand. She was unforgettable.
Victoria Amelina died last Saturday at the age of 37, from injuries sustained after a Russian missile struck a restaurant in Kramatorsk on June 27th. She leaves behind her husband and a 12-year-old son and many people who loved her. She was the 13th person to die as a consequence of that attack. Human Rights groups have called it a war crime.
On Tuesday, a group from Irish Pen, the creative writing NGO Fighting Words and Ukrainian Action issued a statement about her death, calling for an end to such atrocities, and sent it to the Russian Embassy in Dublin.
On Wednesday, her funeral was held in Kyiv.
In the last year of her life, Amelina kept returning to the conflict zone to investigate war crimes but she also sometimes left Ukraine to bear witness to what was happening to her home. She spoke at an Irish Pen event in Smock Alley in Dublin last October as well as a storytelling event for children in Pearse Street library. She was due to return in November to moderate another Irish Pen event about the role of culture in war. She was working on a non-fiction book about the women she had met, War and Justice Diary: Looking at Women Looking at War.
In Vicar Street in April, at the Concert for Ukraine run by the Irish Red Cross, Fighting Words and Ukrainian Action, Amelina and a number of her compatriots brought war home for the Irish people in the venue who had no experience of war. She read devastating but beautiful poems about grief and memory and the things people take with them when they’re fleeing war.
On her Twitter account, the top tweet features a photo of her taking a picture of a bombed building. She has a tote bag over her shoulder.
The text says: “It’s me in this picture. I’m a Ukrainian writer. I have portraits of great Ukrainian poets on my bag. I look like I should be taking pictures of books, art, and my little son. But I document Russia’s war crimes and listen to the sound of shelling, not poems. Why?”
