Victoria Amelina Fellow 2026

International Renaissance Foundation - Spring-Summer 2026 7 April – 30 June 2026

Project: ‘The Invisible Home’

The collection of essays that Anna Gruver has been developing since 2024 — and will continue to work on thanks to the Victoria Amelina Fellowship — is the result of a search for a new poetic form. These are short texts in which literary-critical reflections are interwoven with dreams, descriptions of everyday life, intimate feelings, and the daily experiences of a displaced woman (a civilian) during the full-scale war. The essays are accompanied by photographs which, while they can be viewed independently, are intended to function as an inseparable part of the text within the potential collection.

Anna Gruver explores the relationship with time at the moment of catastrophe (within the context of her own family history, specifically its Jewish heritage, but also in a broader European context). The distance of time, which allows to look back on the experiences of other wars, and the range of intonations, notably that of nostalgia (more specifically, what is known in German as Heimweh, or homesickness), helps to view life and death from different perspectives. Shifting these viewpoints, much like a camera lens, allows one to zoom in on events or pull back to see them more clearly.

This collection is dedicated to the memory of Victoria Amelina, whose entire body of work — from her novel Dom’s Dream Kingdom to the founding of the New York Literary Festival, from documenting war crimes and volunteering to preserving the memory of the writer Volodymyr Vakulenko, murdered by the Russians, and within her own poems — helped people to find or maintain their sense of home

Anna Gruver

Anna Gruver is a Ukrainian writer, poet, and translator, and a member of PEN Ukraine. Born in 1996 in Donetsk, she lived there until the age of 17. She is the author of the novels Her Empty Places (Old Lion Publishing House) and Real Estate (Laboratoria). Anna’s debut novel was published in 2022, following the start of the full-scale war, and was named one of the best books of the year by PEN Ukraine. Her second novel, Real Estate, was first announced in Vogue Ukraine in autumn 2023; in 2025, it was included in PEN Ukraine’s best books list, Chytomo’s Choice for best prose, the Ukrinform shortlist, and the BBC Book of the Year longlist. She is also the compiler and commentator of Free in Captivity (2025, Old Lion Publishing House), a memorial book dedicated to the religious scholar, academic, and prisoner of conscience Ihor Kozlovsky.

She is the author of the poetry collection No Results Found for Your Search (2019). Anna translates essays and contemporary poetry both from and into Polish. As a poet and translator, she was named among the winners of the European Festivals Fund for Emerging Artists (EFFEA) project grants in 2024. In 2025, she became a laureate of the Kraków UNESCO City of Literature Award for her poetry collection I Just Want to Share a Moment.

In 2023, she served as the coordinator for the Ukrainian project The Key of Understanding and as an assistant in the education department at the Galicia Jewish Museum in Kraków. In this role, she translated for Holocaust survivors, worked with Second World War documents and materials related to the ghettos, and led educational workshops for children and teenagers.