The “Encounter” prize to judge non-fiction submissions in 2021

The Ukrainian Jewish Encounter and the NGO “Publishers Forum” (Lviv, Ukraine) are pleased to announce that non-fiction submissions will be judged in the 2021 ‘Encounter: The Ukrainian-Jewish Literary Prize’ ™. Guidelines will be announced mid-January 2021.

In 2021 the prize will be dedicated to non-fiction works that examine, entirely or partly, some aspect of the Ukrainian-Jewish experience: works of history, biographies, memoirs, journalistic writings, and essays.

The ‘Encounter’ prize, established in 2020, is awarded every year to the most important work of fiction and non-fiction (awarded alternately), which fosters Ukrainian-Jewish understanding by celebrating Ukraine as a multiethnic society and embodying UJE’s slogan, “Our stories are incomplete without each other.”

The prize is awarded to authors for a completed work published in the Ukrainian language in Ukraine. Priority will be given to original, Ukrainian-language works, although distinguished works translated from other languages will also be considered.

The announcement of the ‘Encounter’ prize winner and finalists will take place during the 28th Book Forum in Lviv, Ukraine in September 2021.

“We are very gratified by the positive responses to the award that we received during the first year of the prize. We hope that it will encourage more writers to research Ukrainian-Jewish relations and offer an opportunity to present the works of Ukrainian writers to the world,” said Natalia A. Feduschak, Director of Communications of the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter.

Andriy Pavlyshyn—historian, translator, and coordinator of the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter’s program at the Lviv Book Forum—noted, “I hope that our literary prize will spur writers and publishers to new accomplishments. I have great hopes that the wonderful tradition of the ‘Encounter’ prize will turn out to be long-lasting and influential.”

The first winner of ‘Encounter: The Ukrainian-Jewish Literary Prize’ ™ was Vasyl Makhno’s Eternal Calendar (Old Lion Publishing, Lviv), a panoramic account of the life of Ukrainians, Poles, Jews, and Armenians in Western Ukraine from the seventeenth century to the present day.

The prize is sponsored by the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter, a Canadian charitable non-profit organization, with the support of the NGO “Publishers Forum” (Lviv, Ukraine).