Kostya is an ordinary Ukrainian, a product of our time. Politics and Maidan protests are of little interest to him. But the subtitle of the novel "Homo Compatiens" - the man who sympathizes suggests: the main character will not be able to stay in his comfort zone. Because Kostya has a handicap – or perhaps a gift: he empathizes with the pain and excitement of the other. He will experience distant wars and revolutions as his own, to finally return to the revolution in Ukraine and make his choice, realizing that the sympathy that prompts you to act is the only thing that justifies the very existence of sympathy. In our globalized world there are no local conflicts, local problems or local revolutions. Because the grief of one person is the grief of all humanity.
Victoria Amelina was born on January 1, 1986. In her school years, she moved to Canada with her father, but decided to return to Ukraine soon afterwards. In 2007, she graduated cum laude from Lviv Polytechnic University (MA in computer technologies). During 2005-2015, Amelina worked at various international IT companies. In 2014, Victoria Amelina made her debut as a writer with the novel The Fall Syndrome, or Homo Compatiens which was included into top-10 books of the LitAccent 2014 rating. In 2015, the novel was reissued and shortlisted for the Valerii Shevchuk Prize.
In 2015 Victoria Amelina left her successful IT career to dedicate herself exclusively to writing. In 2016, her children’s book Somebody, or Waterheart was published. Amelina’s novel Dom’s Dream Kingdom was published in 2017 and awarded as the best book of the year according to Zaporizhzhia Book Toloka and shortlisted for LitAccent 2017 Prize, UNESCO City of Literature Prize, and European Union Prize for Literature.
Victoria's prose, poems and essays have been translated into many languages, including English, Polish, Italian, German, Croatian, Dutch, Chezh, and Hungarian. Victoria Amelina is the founder of the New York Literature Festival, which takes place in a small town called New York in the Donetsk region.
Due to the full-scale Russian invasion of 2022, instead of the festival, the team launched the "Fight Them with Poetry" initiative to help supply the Ukrainian Army units defending the region.
In September 2022, while doing research in the Izium region, she uncovered the war diary of fellow Ukrainian writer Volodymyr Vakulenko, who had been killed by the occupying forces in March 2022.
On 27 June 2023, she was injured during a Russian attack on Kramatorsk while she was dining together with Héctor Abad, Sergio Jaramillo and Catalina Gómez. The restaurant was hit by an Iskander missile. Amelina died due to her injuries on 1 July at the Mechnikov Hospital in Dnipro at the age of 37. She was buried in Lviv.
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