An Evening in Memory of Victoria Amelina
Date and time:
Thursday 9 November, 2023
19:15 - 20:30
Location:
British Library Knowledge Centre Theatre
96 Euston Road, NW1 2DB
London
Please note that the British Library’s registration page for this event is currently down due to ongoing technical problems. If you haven’t got your ticket and want to attend the event, please email us at info@ukrainianinstitute.org.uk by 12 noon on 9th Nov and we will try to add you to our guest list.
Victoria Amelina was an award-winning Ukrainian writer and poet, and founder of the New York Literature Festival in the Donetsk region. She was the author of two novels, The Fall Syndrome and Dom’s Dream Kingdom, which was a finalist for the European Union Prize for Literature in 2019. In 2021 she was awarded the Joseph Conrad Literary Award. Since the Russian Federation’s full-scale military invasion of Ukraine she began documenting war crimes with the human rights initiative Truth Hounds, and uncovered the buried war diary of Ukrainian writer Volodymyr Vakulenko, who was abducted, and subsequently murdered, by Russian forces in March 2022.
Amelina had recently taken part in the first presentation of his war diary at the Book Arsenal literary festival in Kyiv on 23 June 2023. Four days later Amelina was injured in Russian missile shelling of a pizza restaurant in Kramatorsk.
She died of her injuries in Mechnikov Hospital in Dnipro. At the time of her death, she was working on her first work of non-fiction, Looking At Women Looking At War: A War & Justice Diary, which will be published posthumously.
Friends, colleagues, and translators of her daring and powerful writing gather in the British Library to share and celebrate her life’s work.
This event is organised by the Ukrainian Institute London and the British Library.
Speaker
Sasha Dovzhyk
Sasha Dovzhyk is a writer, literary scholar and curator from Zaporizhzhia. She holds a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Birkbeck, University of London. She is Special Projects Curator for the Ukrainian Institute London and a grantee of the IWM's Documenting Ukraine programme. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Los Angeles Review of Books, CNN Opinion, and others. As well as her work on Ukraine, she has written widely on fin-de-siecle culture, and is editor of Decadent Writings of Aubrey Beardsley (2023), Ukraine Lab: Global Security, Environment, and Disinformation through the Prism of Ukraine (2023), and the London Ukrainian Review.
Speaker
Emma Shercliff
Emma Shercliff is a literary agent and the founder of Laxfield Literary Associates: her clients include Oleksandr Mykhed, Artem Chapeye, Mstyslav Chernov and the estate of Victoria Amelina. Emma has worked for publishing companies in Paris, Melbourne, Abuja and London, and for the British Council in Nigeria and Iran. In 2019 she reviewed the publishing sector in Ukraine for the British Council. She has written for The Bookseller, Wasafiri and LOGOS, and contributed a chapter on Black British Publishing to The Edinburgh Companion to Women in Publishing (2024). Emma is a doctoral candidate at the UCL Institute of Education focussing on the role of women in the African publishing industry.
Moderator
Uilleam Blacker
Uilleam Blacker is a translator and associate professor of Ukrainian and East European culture at University College London. He has written on Ukraine for The Atlantic, The Guardian, and Times Literary Supplement. His translations have appeared in The Guardian, The White Review and Modern Poetry in Translation. His translation of Oleg Sentsov’s Life Went on Anyway was published by Deep Vellum in 2019, and his translations of novels by Taras Prokhasko and Maik Yohansen will be published by Harvard University Press (2024). He was Paul Celan Translation Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna in 2022 and in 2023 was a jury member for the International Booker Prize.
