Books at the Institute: Looking at Women Looking at War

Books at the Institute presents Looking at Women Looking at War on Wednesday, February 19, 2025 at 6:30 PM. Join Tetyana Teren, Executive Director, PEN Ukraine, and Lydia Tomkiw, journalist, for an engaging discussion of Victoria Amelina’s acclaimed book, Looking at Women Looking at War.

When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Victoria Amelina was busy writing a novel, taking part in the country’s literary scene, and parenting her son. Now she became someone new: a war crimes researcher and the chronicler of extraordinary women like herself who joined the resistance. These heroines include Evgenia, a prominent lawyer turned soldier, Oleksandra, who documented tens of thousands of war crimes and won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, and Yulia, a librarian who helped uncover the abduction and murder of a children’s book author.

Everyone in Ukraine knew that Amelina was documenting the war. She photographed the ruins of schools and cultural centers; she recorded the testimonies of survivors and eyewitnesses to atrocities. And she slowly turned back into a storyteller, writing what would become this book.

On the evening of June 27th, 2023, Amelina and three international writers stopped for dinner in the embattled Donetsk region. When a Russian cruise missile hit the restaurant, Amelina suffered grievous head injuries, and lost consciousness. She died on July 1st. She was thirty-seven. She left behind an incredible account of the ravages of war and the cost of resistance. Honest, intimate, and wry, this book will be celebrated as a classic.

Victoria Amelina was killed by a Russian missile in July 2023. She was an award-winning Ukrainian novelist, essayist, poet, and human rights activist whose prose and poems have been translated into many languages. In 2019/2020, she lived and traveled extensively in the US. She wrote both in Ukrainian and English, and her essays have appeared in Irish Times, Dublin Review of Books, and Eurozine.

Tetyana Teren is a Ukrainian journalist, cultural manager, and the Executive Director of PEN Ukraine since 2018. She previously served as the head of the Ukrainian Book Institute (2017–2018) and has worked as a TV presenter, editor, and journalist for leading Ukrainian media, including Ukrainska Pravda. Kultura, Channel 5, and Book Basket on Kharkiv’s А/ТВК. Tetyana is the author of five books featuring interviews with Ukrainian writers and artists. She has collaborated as a curator with prominent cultural institutions and festivals such as PinchukArtCentre, Culture Project, and Book Arsenal. Her work has appeared in outlets like Den, Tyzhden, and Harper’s Bazaar Ukraine.

Lydia Tomkiw is a journalist based in New York City. Her work covering finance, economics, international, and domestic news has appeared in numerous publications including the Financial Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Foreign Policy, PRX’s The World, Slate, Saveur, International Business Times, and the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard. Lydia has deep expertise on Ukraine and has reported from the country since 2014. As a fluent Ukrainian speaker, she has covered numerous topics over the years, including most recently a look at how Ukrainian children’s book authors are explaining the war and how conservators are scanning Ukraine’s wooden churches amid war.