Young City Readings. A Road to Freedom

It's in people's nature to create their freedom as well as to outline its boundaries. And no matter how hard trying, we wouldn't give up this personal freedom. This is shown, in particular, within the nowadays reality, when Ukrainians are daily fighting for their freedom, going through many difficulties and, importantly, being human.

This is where the story of "Vilnius-Lviv" begins its literary journey. This year, we decided to jointly implement the Young City Reading project, which is a program of support for emerging authors, because we have a similar past and we do not want the realities of Ukrainian society to reach Vilnius. This is how the idea of joint readings of the Young City under the motto "The Road to Freedom" was born. We want to outline the red lines that now there is freedom for Ukraine and Lithuania, Lviv, and Vilnius. The symbol of this outline for us was a poem by Vasyl Stus, an outstanding Ukrainian poet from Donetsk, who defended his freedom all his life, paving the way for it for future generations. We are convinced that the "road to freedom" is common to Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and other peoples who are making their way into the great European family.

We propose you write a short prose text - reflections on the theme of war in Ukraine and the path to Freedom. The text will be later scanned by experts - Anastasiia Levkova, Ostap Slyvynsky, and Petro Yatsenko. They will choose the best works and will give the authors a few pieces of advice that will help them to improve the text.

Participants could be writers that entitle themselves as emerging, regardless of their age, that have no more than five works published in a previous calendar year. The text should be in Ukrainian language, up to 1500 words.

deadline for texts - August 31st!

The competition finalists will be published in the "Young City Readings" almanac and their works translated into the Lithuanian language!

Sign up: https://forms.gle/eiaQGF5WaHzwX5yg9