The New England chapter of the American Pen Club has established an international prize named after Vasyl Stus, the outstanding Ukrainian poet who died in a Soviet concentration camp in 1985.
The prize is awarded every year to artists, who were subjected to persecution in their countries for their political views and who displayed steadfastness along with creative and civic honesty in their fight for human rights. In addition to a considerable sum of money, the prize envisions honorary membership in the Pen Club, the country's most authoritative literary organization. The prize also involves measures to popularize the works of a prize winner and to attract the attention of the international community to the problems faced by his home country.
Resep Marashvili, a Kurdish poet, publicist, publisher, and a human rights activist, has become the first winner of the Vasyl Stus Literary Prize. The Pen Club Committee for Creative Freedom, chaired by Susan Burns, held a press conference. The subject of the press conference was the attitudes of modern artists toward the gravest crimes of this century such as the Armenian Massacres, Ukrainian Famine, and Jewish Holocaust.
The great respect shown by the Americans for Ukrainian Vasyl Stus stands out as a pleasant foil to a recent scandalous refusal of the administration of the Vinnytsia Pedagogical Institute to name their institution after Vasyl Stus.






