Winnipeg, February 5, 2026 – 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In this short story, her first unpublished non-fiction work, Anastasia shares the experience of a young newcomer to Canada forced to navigate a new reality while struggling with conflicting cultural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.”
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,“ writes Anastasia.
The $2,500 prize is awarded annually by The Shevchenko Foundation to a Canadian writer for the best piece of unpublished prose of up to 3,000 words in the English language offering a unique lens through which to view the Ukrainian Canadian experience.
About The Shevchenko Foundation
The Shevchenko Foundation is a national, chartered philanthropic institution dedicated to the preservation, promotion, and development of the Ukrainian Canadian cultural heritage. 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. For more information visit www.shevchenkofoundation.com.
About the Emerging Writers Short Prose Competition:
https://www.kobzarbookaward.com/emerging-author-award/
About the KOBZAR Book Award:
https://www.kobzarbookaward.com/about/
2026 Emerging Writers Short Prose Competition Jury
Elizabeth Bachinsky
ELIZABETH BACHINSKY
Elizabeth Bachinsky is the author of six books of poetry, including the Kobzar award-nominated collection God of Missed Connections and Real Grownup (Nightwood Editions) forthcoming fall 2025. She lives on the traditional, unceded territories of the Coast Salish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-waututh nations where she teaches creative writing at Douglas College (New Westminster.)
Lisa Grekul
LISA GREKUL
Lisa Grekul is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies on the Okanagan campus of the University of British Columbia. Her teaching and research focus on writing by minoritized/diasporic Canadians—Ukrainian Canadians, in particular. She is the author of Kalyna’s Song (2003) and Leaving Shadows: Literature in English by Canada’s Ukrainians (2005); she co-edited, with Lindy Ledohowski, Unbound: Ukrainian Canadians Writing Home (2016).
Ella Soper
ELLA SOPER
Ella Soper completed her PhD at the University of Toronto, and taught English literature at the University of Toronto and York University in what is now known as the Faculty of Environmental and Social Change (she held a postdoctoral fellowship in the same department when it was known as the Faculty of Environmental Studies). She served as Managing Editor of echolocation and as Founding Co-Editor of The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada. Her work has appeared in anthologies, journals, and magazines. She is also co-editor, with Nicholas Bradley, of Greening the Maple: Canadian Ecocriticism in Context.
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