The winners of the Krapivin International Children’s Literature Award were named on October 14 in Yekaterinburg, ITAR-TASS reports. Olga Kolpakova, chairwoman of the Children Writers’ Association, said that the jury decided to award four authors this year instead of one, as traditionally was the case in past years.
Three Russians and one Ukrainian received the award: Elena Rakitina (St. Peterburg) for her short story collection The Doorphone Thief; Roman Fedin (Tula) for his short story One Day in the Life of Denis Ivanovich; Yulia Lavryashina (Korolev) for her novel Snail on a Plate; and Yuri Ligun (Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine) for his novel in short stories Little Fishies, Little Piglets.
“These four authors received an almost identical number of points, so we decided to split the prize among all four and present them with medals. All of the contenders were very strong,” Olga Kolpakova said.
The Association of Writers of the Urals initiated the Krapivin Prize in 2006. The award is given out once a year.
Vladislav Krapivin, after whom the prize is named, was born in the city of Tyumen on 14 October 1938. He received a degree in journalism from the Ural State University. In the course of his studies, he started working at the newspaper "Evening Sverdlovsk", followed by several years in the periodical "Ural Pathfinder". Krapivin has been a full-time writer since 1965. His first book, The Voyage of Orion, was printed by the Sverdlovsk publishing house in 1962. Over the course of his literary career, Krapivin became the author of more than 200 publications, many of which have been translated.
