Establishing cultural ties and tons of positive emotions

According to Valerii Kruhov, organizer of the “Gogol-Fantasy” festival, over the past four years they have managed to get nearly 3,000 authors from 72 countries involved in competitions of the festival in various nominations. This resulted in publication of three literary collections with the best prize winning illustrations, two catalogs of cartoons, exhibitions in Kharkiv, Lviv, Yalta, Poltava, and Kherson, establishing cultural ties between artists from different countries, cooperation with sponsors, and tons of positive emotions from working together. In 2013 the organizers suggested a new nomination – for the best fantasy short film script. Besides, one of the results of the held literary contest is an agreement with theater directors Oleksandr Knyha (Kherson), Bohdan Cherniavsky (Poltava), and Vadim Romanov (Saint Petersburg), who are the part of the international jury of the “Gogol-Fantasy” festival, for staging the best fantasy stories.

The winners of this year’s festival were the four authors: winner of the Grand Prix of the literary contest in the nomination “The Story in Ukrainian” is Valerii Verkhivsky (Kakhovka) for his story Silver and Gold; Vladimir Oroev (Lhov, Russia) became the best Russian author for his story Sketches of Tiatevskaia; the Reader’s Choice is the story Fall’s Rooms are Always Empty by Natalia Garakhanova (Baku, Azerbaijan). For this story Garakhanova will receive a statue Angel from Lviv-based ceramic master Maria Hoin. The winner of the illustrators contest became Nadia Kyziurova (Syktyvkar, Russia) for the series of illustrations and the cover of the collection “Gogol-Fantasy 2012.”