The Ivan Franko International Fund has published the shortlist of nominees for the Award in 2023. The works of all 15 applicants for the Ivan Franko International Prize have been evaluated by 32 scientists of the Expert Council from 6 European countries  – Italy, Austria, Czech Republic, Italy, Poland.Slovakia and Ukraine. Invariable criteria for evaluating scientific publications submitted for the Prize are the presence of innovative and non-standard approaches to certain phenomena, conceptuality, criticality and systematicity, international context and level. Taking these requirements into account, the members of the Expert Council gave the highest scores and nominated the following three applicants for the Ivan Franko International Prize:

1. NATALIA BILOUS with the monograph “One step to Eternity. Residents of the cities in Volyn in the light of testaments of the late 16th and 17th centuries.” Institute of History of Ukraine NASU, Kyiv “Prostir”, 2021. – 536 p.

2. MYKOLA LEHKYI with the monograph “Ivan Franko’s Prose: Poetics, Aesthetics, Reception in Criticism.” State Institution Ivan Franko Institute at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. – Lviv: Lviv Polytechnic Publishing House, 2021. – 608 p.

3. GROUP OF AUTHORS with the publication “Galician-Volyn Chronicle: Textology” / edited by O. P. Tolochko; NAS of Ukraine, Institute of History of Ukraine. – Kyiv: Akademperiodika, 2020. – 929 p.

The TOP-5 list of scientific works studied by the experts also included: Lviv researcher Solomia Buk with the monograph “Ivan Franko’s great prose: electronic corpus, frequency dictionaries and other interdisciplinary contexts” and Japanese historian Yoshihiko Okabe’s book “History of Japanese-Ukrainian relations 1915–1937″.

Since the Ivan Franko International Prize was not awarded last year due to the full-scale invasion of the territory of Ukraine by the russian occupying forces, the works submitted in 2022 are competing for the victory this year.The meeting of the international jury of the Award is due to take place in the summer of 2023. The awarding ceremony of the Laureate will traditionally be held in Ivan Franko’s homeland, in the city of Drohobych, on August 27, 2023 – the 167th anniversary of his birth.

For reference: The Ivan Franko International Prize was founded by Roland Franko, the grandson of the Great Kameniar. The highest distinction in the field of humanities has been awarded annually since 2016. The laureates of the Prize receive a monetary reward and a gold badge.

In previous years, the awards were given to Cardinal of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church Lubomyr Husar, Professor Michael Moser (University of Vienna), Academician Oleh Shabliy (Ivan Franko National University in Lviv), Professor Yaroslava Melnyk (the Ukrainian Catholic University), Associate Professor Maria Grazia Bartolini (Eastern European University in Helsinki), Professor Ihor Serdyuk (Department of the History of Ukraine, Poltava National Pedagogical University named after V.G. Korolenko), Professor Leonid Tymoshenko (Drohobych Ivan Franko State Pedagogical University).