Competition results for the "Quarantine Experiences"

The team of the Center for Urban History, a Program in Culture Studies, Sociology, and a Master's Program in History of the Ukrainian Catholic University hereby express their gratitude to everyone who shared their personal and family stories, joys and worries, achievements and doubts in May and in June, 2020. We thank everyone who sent to us their poems and diaries, essays and observations. Due to the stories, we felt the belonging to the "quarantine community," the people who jointly faced the challenge of the pandemic.

231 letters were received to the "Quarantine Experiences" competition, both emails and written in hand. They came from all over Ukraine, and also from beyond. Authors of texts are men and women aged 8 to 73, residents of big cities, towns, and villages, people of various occupations (teachers, engineers, scholars, journalists, musicians, and doctors), retired people, school pupils, and students. They were all telling about their unique experiences in different forms and genres. For over two months, the jury were reading the texts, in several stages. Each work was assigned with the individual 7-digit code to enable the blind assessment. After a series of discussions, we reached a shared conclusion. So, we are happy to share the Competition results:

• The first prize goess to a story by Natalia from Kyiv about the daily routine of the quarantine in a big family, when people of different generations and professions share the time and space within three rooms, with a foreigner among them;
• two second prizes go to a diary by a musician Esken from Simferopol, currently living in Lviv, and to observations over the emergence of the Homo Covid from a Lviv-based essayist and a poetess Maria;
• three third prizes go to a story by a pensioner Nadia from Dnipro who started her job as a nurse shortly before the quarantine; a dialogue by a journalist Olena with her baby who is about to be born; a story by Anzhela from Israel who was visiting her parents in Zaporizhzhia and had to stay in Ukraine longer than planned.

We are also happy to inform that the jury decided to award special prizes to several more pieces. They reveal to us the voices we rarely hear in the stories on the quarantine experiences: a story by Rostyslav, a 9^th grader from Kyiv, who rediscovered the importance of human communication; by Yevhenia, from a small village in Lviv region who keeps doing her job serving many people, against all odds; Viacheslav from Donetsk who shared his "sickness record" and sketches from Kyiv life; and Liudmyla from Ternopil who inspires to overcome the pain and stay optimistic.

We truly celebrate all the competition participants. Unfortunately, we are not able to award prizes for all the deep and interesting stories. However, we do hope the quarantine experiences will be heard. The next step in the competition is the planned publication upon its results. We will keep you informed about format and scope.

Credits

Cover Image: by Marek Grygiel // Archive 404 Collection, Urban Media Archive