Viktoriya Amelina posthumously wins Moore International Prize for book on women at war

The Christopher G. Moore Foundation has announced the winner of its ninth annual Human Rights Writing Prize

This year, the award was awarded posthumously to Ukrainian writer Viktoriya Amelina for her book “Looking at Women Looking at War: A War and Justice Diary.”

The book was recognized as the best work on the topic of human rights published between July 2024 and June 2025. Viktoriya Amelina did not have time to finish the manuscript as she was killed in a russian missile strike on a restaurant in Kramatorsk on June 27, 2023, while she was there on a research trip.

When full-scale war broke out in 2022, Amelina was working on a new novel. But overnight, she became a chronicler of the war and the courageous women who joined the resistance. The writer traveled throughout Ukraine, photographing destroyed homes, schools, and public buildings, recording the testimonies of eyewitnesses and survivors of russian atrocities.

After her death, friends and colleagues used the interviews, diaries, audio files, and notes she had collected to prepare the unfinished manuscript for publication. The result was a book that an international jury called ‘an extraordinary account of the horrors of war, the cost of resistance, and women as agents of change’.

The prize jury, investigative journalist Clare Hammond, Human Rights Watch Asia director Elaine Pearson, and Vilnius University professor Dainius Pūras, emphasized that Amelina’s work is an expression of courage and a vivid reflection of the wartime role of women, whose daily survival is an achievement in itself. What makes the book especially poignant is that the author died while working on it.

The founder of the foundation, Christopher G. Moore, noted that Viktoriya Amelina’s book is a reminder of the sacrifice of a journalist who sought to report the truth about lives destroyed by the russian invasion. “Amidst the dominance of propaganda and disinformation, her legacy remains a vital record of what happened and continues to happen,” Moore emphasized.

More information about the award and the foundation can be found on the Christopher G. Moore Foundation website.

List of journalists killed since the beginning of the full-scale aggression unleashed by russia.