Anastasia Skrypnyk, a Toronto-based Ukrainian-Canadian writer, has been selected winner of The Shevchenko Foundation Emerging Writers Short Prose Competition in 2026 for her story JCS: Impressions, Pt. 1.
Anastasia immigrated to Canada with her family from Kitsman, Ukraine, at the age of 11. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Toronto with a Specialist in English Literature. In her academic and personal writing, Anastasia examines the complexity of human relationships, trauma and abuse, and first-generation immigrant experience.
In this short story, her first unpublished non-fiction work, Anastasia shares the experience of a young newcomer to Canada forced to navigate a new reality while struggling with conflicting cultural expectations.
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, “JCS: Impressions, Pt. 1 is an expertly-written, engaging short story (at times humorous, often heartbreaking) that captures, poignantly, the inner conflicts of a young, Ukrainian newcomer to Canada. Readers are drawn into the narrator’s experiences of the new/foreign world in which she has found herself, alongside her memories of (and longing for) home.”
Ella Soper comments, “JCS: Impressions, Pt. 1 is a refreshingly candid, unsentimental story in contrasts that weighs the stability of life in “happy Etobicoke” against the chaotic freedom and “dilapidated brutalism” of the Eastern European school system. Seen up close, this is a story of surviving middle-school social politics; at a distance, it’s about loyalty, guilt, and conflicted longings.”
“In JCS: Impressions, Pt. 1, Justin Beiber, Abercrombie and Fitch, and Bratz dolls meet “hard-core post-communist eastern european brutalism.” Readers experience the social tragedy of what it’s like for a girl to grow up Ukrainian-Canadian, uncool, in the diaspora. Simultaneously heartbreaking and heartwarming; clever and funny,” writes Elizabeth Bachinsky.
Anastasia Skrypnyk was grateful to have her entry chosen as the winner of the 2026 TSF Emerging Writers Short Prose Competition, sharing that the award will support her plans to expand on the story about her immigrant experience in Canada. “This grant not only provided me with an opportunity to explore my identity in text but also inspired a deeper examination of a fractured self, contending with loss and a new cross-cultural becoming that extends beyond my short story,“ Anastasia wrote.
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.
For more information on the TSF Emerging Writers Short Prose Competition visit https://www.kobzarbookaward.com/emerging-author-award/