Victoria Amelina wins 2025 Moore Prize for Human Rights Writing

Posthumous Prize for Ukrainian Author Killed by Russian Strike

The Christopher G. Moore Foundation is delighted to announce the 2025 winner of its ninth annual Moore Prize for Human Rights Writing, which honours books that explore human rights themes.

Looking at Women Looking at War: A War and Justice Diary by Victoria Amelina (William Collins/St. Martin's Press) has been chosen as the best book with a human rights theme published between 1 July 2024 and 30 June 2025. The prize is awarded posthumously to Ukrainian author Amelina, who was killed before she was able to complete the book.

The 2025 jury - investigative journalist and author Clare Hammond, Director of Human Rights Watch Asia Elaine Pearson and Dr Dainius Pūras, professor of psychiatry and public mental health at Vilnius University - were deeply moved by this unsparing account of the war crimes and the devastating changes war has brought to each person and family throughout Ukraine.

When the war in Ukraine began in 2022, novelist Amelina was working on a new book. Overnight, she became a chronicler of the war and of the courageous women who, like herself, joined the resistance. She travelled the country documenting the effects of war through photographs of ruined homes, schools and community buildings, and recorded testimonies of eyewitnesses and survivors of the atrocities.

Her own death came while on a research trip in Donetsk region, when a Russian cruise missile fell on a restaurant where she and others were having dinner. Her collection of interviews, diary entries, audio files and notes to complete the book was used by friends and colleagues to prepare the unfinished manuscript for publication. The result is an extraordinary account of the horrors of war, the cost of resistance and of women as agents of change. Looking at Women Looking at War is an important document for future justice and future generations.

Christopher G Moore, Foundation Founder says:

“Victoria Amelina's account of Russian war crimes in Ukraine is a poignant reminder of the sacrifice of a journalist driven by passion to report the truth about the lives shattered by the Russian invasion. The book stands as a testament to Amelina's courage in bringing into focus the devastating consequences of war for ordinary Ukrainians. Amid so much propaganda and misinformation, her legacy endures as a vital record of what has happened and continues to happen. I am pleased with the jury's decision, which was difficult given the exceptional quality of the shortlisted books.”

The Jury commented:

“We were each deeply affected by Looking at Women Looking at War. It is a work of courage, a vivid expression of the turmoil of life and of the wartime role of women whose daily survival is an achievement in itself. Amelina revealed the full experience of war from the inside, while maintaining a positive focus on solutions as part of the story. It is an evocative expression of heart, soul and sacrifice, of people taking power into their own hands, made all the more poignant by the fact that Amelina herself was killed while researching the book.”

Clare Hammond  is a London-based investigative journalist. She works for non-profit Global Witness, where her reporting focuses on the intersection between natural resources, conflict and corruption. In Myanmar, where she worked for six years until 2020, she was most recently digital editor of investigative magazine Frontier Myanmar. There, she oversaw daily news coverage and set up a disinformation reporting unit. She also led the digital transformation of the newsroom, building a reader revenue programme that enabled the publication to survive the 2021 Myanmar coup. A Google News Initiative and Pulitzer Centre on Crisis Reporting grantee, her work has won multiple awards. She is the author of On the Shadow Tracks: A Journey through Occupied Myanmar. 

Elaine Pearson is Human Rights Watch's Asia director, overseeing the work of the Asia division in more than 20 countries. She has conducted numerous human rights investigations in the Asia-Pacific region and around the world. Elaine writes frequently for a range of publications and her articles have appeared in the Guardian, Foreign Policy, and the Washington Post. She is on the board of the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women.  Prior to joining Human Rights Watch, Elaine worked for the United Nations and various non-governmental organizations in Bangkok, Hong Kong, Kathmandu, and London. Elaine is the author of Chasing Wrongs and Rights, published by Simon and Schuster in September 2022. 

Dr Dainius Pūras is professor of child and adolescent psychiatry and public mental health at Vilnius University, Lithuania. He is also a consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist at the Child Development Center of Vilnius University Hospital. Among positions he has held, Dainius was President of the Lithuanian Psychiatric Association, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Vilnius University, and Director of the Human Rights Monitoring Institute. During the years 2007-2011 he was a member of the UN Committee on the rights of the child. From 2014 till 2020 he served as a UN Special Rapporteur on the right to physical and mental health.