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A novelist killed in the Ukraine war has won the Orwell prize for political writing.
Victoria Amelina, who died in July 2023 from injuries sustained in a Russian bombing of a restaurant in Kramatorsk, won the prize with her unfinished book Looking at Women Looking at War.
The book – Amelina’s only work of nonfiction – documents the resistance efforts of Ukrainian women, including a soldier, a human rights activist and a librarian. “The effect is of an ensemble of female voices, not a solo aria”, wrote Charlotte Higgins in a Guardian review. The book is “an important piece of testimony and a precious, powerful work of literature: a steady beam of light born amid darkness and violence”.
Amelina “brings to her narrative the acuity of a journalist and the artistry of a born writer, making her a true heir of George Orwell”, said judging chair Kim Darroch.
Meanwhile, Irish writer Donal Ryan was awarded the Orwell prize for political fiction for Heart, Be at Peace, which is set in rural Ireland and told in 21 voices. The book is a follow-up to his debut The Spinning Heart, which won the 2013 Guardian first book award.
The mosaic of voices in Heart, Be at Peace becomes “a kind of simulacrum of life, as if we have been landed in this village, have a chance to overhear its inhabitants’ most private thoughts, move from one house to another, sit in the pub, discover who believes who is to blame for what, and what can be excused or forgiven,” wrote Erica Wagner in her Guardian review.
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“Here is a small deprived community in rural Ireland – after the Good Friday Peace Accord and the collapse of the Celtic Tiger – suffering and recovering from the bruises of its political and economic past,” said fiction prize judging chair Jim Crace. “The boom years – in both senses of that word, might be over – but, in Donal Ryan’s exceptional Heart, Be at Peace, the echoes still reverberate and hum.”
Amelina and Ryan were announced as the winners at a ceremony in London on Wednesday evening, coinciding with Orwell’s birthday. Each prize is worth £3,000. Amelina’s husband, Alex, accepted the award on her behalf, and her prize money will go towards supporting the festival she started in Ukraine, New York Literary festival. New York is the town in Donetsk where Alex is from.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Amelina was working on a novel, but soon pivoted to poetry and nonfiction writing. She had sent the latest draft of Looking at Women Looking at War to a friend shortly before she was killed.
After her death at 37, a group of writers along with Alex arranged the material – which they estimated to be about 60% of what Amelina had planned – into a readable version, adding footnotes and sometimes inserting material from earlier drafts.
Joining Darroch on the political writing judging panel was sociologist Colin Crouch, former MP Thangam Debbonaire, historian Katja Hoyer and journalist Cindy Yu. On the fiction panel Crace judged alongside journalist Laura Battle, literature professor Matthew Beaumont and writer Anita Sethi.
Last year, Hisham Matar won the fiction prize for My Friends, while Matthew Longo took home the nonfiction award for The Picnic.
