Victoria Amelina Fellow

INDEX - Summer 2025 1 July – 30 September 2025

Eva Peek's literary non-fiction project delves into the experiences of Ukrainian women during the ongoing full-scale invasion, intertwining personal narratives, historical insight, and feminist reflection. While the war in Ukraine commands significant attention in Dutch media and feminist issues are widely discussed, these two conversations rarely overlap. This book aims to bridge that divide by illuminating Ukrainian women’s stories, revealing the costs, contradictions, and courage they embody.

Drawing on months of fieldwork and interviews with diverse women all over Ukraine, from soldiers and medics to teachers and artists and with the help of historical figures such as Lesya Ukrainka, the book tries to make sense of the tangled relationship between national struggle and feminist struggle. Can these two causes, often viewed as incompatible in Western feminist circles, actually complement each other? Above all, the book seeks to share the stories of Ukrainian women living through war, fighting both for their country and for their place within it, at great personal cost.

Eva Peek

Eva Peek is a journalist and writer based in Amsterdam. After studying literature, musicology, and history in Amsterdam, Paris, and Leiden, she began her career as a book and music critic for the Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad. She spent several years as an editor at the Dutch Review of Books and currently works on the foreign desk of NRC. Her book, Death Smells Like Cotton Candy, which portrays five women’s wartime experiences in Ukraine, was published in 2025.