Winnipeg – Camille Pavlenko, Alberta writer, early-career playwright, and theatre artist, has been selected winner of The Shevchenko Foundation Emerging Writers Short Prose Competition in 2025 for her story Kuzmenko Residence.
Camille Pavlenko’s plays for children, adults, and radio have been produced by professional companies across her home province, where her adaptation of Rapunzel (with music written by VISSIA) is currently touring for the 2024-25 school year with the Alberta Musical Theatre Company. Lunchbox Theatre will premiere her comedy Go for Gold, Audrey Pham, and Calgary Young People’s Theatre will direct her new adaptation of Lewis Caroll’s The Hunting of the Snark.
Camille is a two-time Betty Mitchell Award nominee and a past recipient of the Shevchenko Emerging Writers Short Prose Competition as well as a runner-up for the Bridge Prize and the Lee Playwriting Prize.
This year’s jury included author and KOBZAR Book Award finalist Elizabeth Bachinsky, professor and KOBZAR Book Award winner Lisa Grekul, and editor Ella Soper.
Adjudicator Lisa Grekul writes about the winning entry, “Kuzmenko Residence offers an intimate glimpse into the world of one Ukrainian family as they navigate intergenerational tensions engendered, in part, by the narrator’s imminent return to Canada, a move that promises opportunity for her but carries with it deep grief.”
“The voices and details in Kuzmenko Residence are authentic and relatable, its characters complex, and its narrative deceptively simple. The writing here is confident and unsentimental,” writes Elizabeth Bachinsky.
Ella Soper comments, “This is a subtle story, and one that could be mistaken for a small story about a minor theme, but it simmers with intergenerational tension, and complicated longing in a way that is wholly original, and much bigger in thematic scope than it at first appears to be.”
Camille Pavlenko was grateful to have her entry chosen as the winner of the 2025 Shevchenko Foundation Emerging Writers Short Prose Competition. “In the sea of budding novelists and aspiring authors, moments where one receives recognition are as precious as gold! The Shevchenko Foundation’s generous prize and humbling spotlight grants me the confidence to keep pursuing excellence as I finish my master’s degree in creative writing,” Camille shared.
The adjudicators also acknowledged one semi-finalist – Oleksandra Budna for her story Geometry of Meaning.
Oleksandra works as a communications professional in Toronto, Ontario. Through her writing and photography, she explores the themes of connection to and responsibility for the land, the joys and pains of being human, and the search for magic and beauty in the ordinary. She shares these stories on her Stories of Entangled Life and Gone Camping blogs. Oleksandra’s photos appeared in Blank Spaces magazine, and she was long-listed for the CBC Non-Fiction Prize in 2020 and 2023.
Geometry of Meaning examines the significance of the rushnyk, or embroidered towel, in telling stories of the past, present, and future as embodied in a cultural identity.
The $2,500 prize is awarded annually by The Shevchenko Foundation to a Canadian writer for the best piece of unpublished prose of up to 3,000 words in the English language offering a unique lens through which to view the Ukrainian Canadian experience. Committed to encouraging and promoting new authors, the Emerging Writers Short Prose Competition sets the groundwork for new writers to explore the short prose form and aspire to submit an entry to the KOBZAR Book Award.
About the Emerging Writers Short Prose Competition:
https://www.kobzarbookaward.com/emerging-author-award/
About the KOBZAR Book Award:
https://www.kobzarbookaward.com/about/