Looking at Women Looking at War

 

Looking at Women Looking at War / Victoria Amelina
Ukrainian sections translated by Daisy Gibbons and Uilleam Blakker
NY: St. Martin's, 2025.
320 p.

Starting off Women in Translation month with some serious subject matter. But I felt it was important to focus on some of the books about Ukraine that have been coming out, and stay aware of what is still happening there. 

This book is a collection of writing by Victoria Amelina, some finished pieces and some notes she had been making for her book, before she was killed in a Russian missile attack on a cafe full of writers. Her words and her dedication to pursuing evidence of war crimes are powerful. 

She wrote both in Ukrainian and in English; the Ukrainian prose in this book is translated by Daisy Gibbons, while the poetry is translated by Uilleam Blacker. The first half of the book is more traditional, in that it has some finished or mostly finished essays and topics. The second half is more a collection of notes for further writing, pieces that Amelina never got to write, being murdered by Russians before she could finish them. 

It's a tough read, in the sense that she is giving up her literary activities and home life to focus on going to dangerous places and gathering people's stories, to create evidence of war crimes. And it's tough reading because you know before you begin that she was killed in a missile strike before this could be finished. 

The complete essays are must reads. And the notes are gathered together in a fragmentary collection, but with many footnotes and explanations by the editors and translators. This does help to make sense of them, and place them in the context of what she had been planning to write about. The very fact that you are reading her notes drives home the violence and the very war crimes she was investigating. 

This book recently won the Orwell Prize for Political Writing, awarded posthumously to Amelina.