Book of the Year 2006 winners named
Don’t look for them in libraries yet
On Feb. 24 Ukrainian House hosted the eighth awards ceremony honoring the winners of the Book of the Year. The event was eagerly attended by people who consider books as the best kind of present and who follow the principle, “Tell me what you read, and I will tell you who you are.” Out of 147 submitted books 21 were named winners.
The jury, which included more than a hundred experts, selected nominees from among 3,000 publications that appeared on the Ukrainian market last year. “Every year many books are published in Ukraine and every year their quality improves,” says Kostiantyn Rodyk, the editor of the journal Knyzhnyk Review, “so when there is a sufficient supply, making a choice is not easy because you have to choose the best. If you try to figure out the Book Chamber’s absolutely nonmarket statistics, some 5,000 books reach the book market, not counting textbooks. In our case, three-quarters of these books were studied by our experts. This is a considerably better index compared to previous years.”
Asked whether all the nominated books will be available in libraries, Rodyk replied, “The French say that you don’t have to drink a barrel of wine to establish its quality. I will put it this way: the state is not prepared to act as a patron of its own libraries. We hope that the best books will be in Ukrainian libraries next year.”
For the first time this year the organizers invited all Kyiv residents and guests of the capital to take part in the competitions and literary auctions preceding the awards ceremony and to attend the event. Every visitor who purchased a book could participate in a lottery with winners receiving books. Guests were entertained by a rock group with an original, authentic name, DakhaBrakha (from two Old Ukrainian verbs meaning “to give” and “to take”). Their music was enjoyable. I never imagined that an Indian tabla and a Buddhist gong could sound so harmonious with a cello.
During the ceremony emcees Kostiantyn Rodyk and Lesia Sakada- Ostrovsky (1+1 Channel) named the winners in the seven traditional nominations: Textbook, Fiction, Sophia, The Past, Horizons, Children’s Holiday, and Calling Card. The books The Ukrainian Chronicle of Clothing, vol. 1: 13th-Early 14th Centuries; Kyiv Album: Photo Album ; Lidia Artiukh’s Traditional Ukrainian Cuisine in the Folk Calendar, and Mykola Hohol’s (Nikolai Gogol) Christmas Eve deserve special notice.
This year it was decided not to award the Grand Prix. Both contenders, Myroslav Popovych’s The Red Century and Rostyslav Radyshevsky and Volodymyr Sverbyhuz’s Ivan Mazepa in the Sarmatian-Roksolianian Dimension of the High Baroque scored the same number of points and remained winners in their respective nominations, Sophia and The Past.
