Ukrainian writer Viktoriia Amelina receives special Prix Voltaire award posthumously

Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina has been posthumously awarded the Prix Voltaire, a special prize of the International Publishers Association. The special award was given to the head of the Centre for Civil Liberties, Nobel laureate Oleksandra Matviichuk, during the International Publishers' Congress. Source: PEN Ukraine, a Ukrainian NGO that protects freedom of speech, and authors' rights and promotes the development of literature

The special prize is awarded to people who died for their freedom of speech, says the International Publishers Association.

The association's website states that the purpose of the award is to demonstrate the laureates' exceptional commitment to freedom of speech and to shed light on how they were silenced. The organisers recalled Viktoriia Amelina's speech in 2023 during a congress in Norway when the writer accepted a special award on behalf of Ukrainian children's writer Volodymyr Vakulenko. The man was killed by the Russian military during the occupation of Kharkiv Oblast.

"I, a Ukrainian writer, am speaking on behalf of my colleague Volodymyr Vakulenko, who, unlike me, did not survive another attempt to erase Ukrainian identity committed by the Russian Empire.

This award is unique, meaningful and moving. This is partly because none of the hundreds of other Ukrainian authors who, like Vakulenko, have been murdered throughout Ukrainian history have ever received this international honour posthumously. I am sure that Volodymyr Vakulenko would have wanted to dedicate this prize to them as well," Amelina said at the time.

Viktoriia Amelina's works have been translated into Polish, Czech, German, Dutch, English, and Spanish. The writer won the Joseph Conrad Korzeniowski Literary Prize in 2021. She was also nominated for the Angelus Central European Literary Award the same year.

After the start of the full-scale invasion, Viktoriia stopped writing fiction and became a member of Truth Hounds, an organisation that documents human rights violations in Ukraine and other countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. She also participated in charity trips of PEN Ukraine writers to the country's liberated territories. Viktoriia Amelina was injured in a Russian bombardment of a cafe in Kramatorsk on 27 June 2023.

She was accompanying a delegation of writers and journalists from Colombia on a trip to eastern Ukraine.

Viktoriia died on 1 July 2023 despite the doctors' efforts to save her life.

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