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Open Call Antytvir 2024

13.03.24
  • OPEN CALL
The International Book Arsenal Festival invites teenagers to participate in the Antytvir 2024 project and become one of the authors published in a print collection of works.

Antytvir is a project for teenagers in grades 8-11 who write, illustrate, and/or draw works using non-standard approaches. Antytvir usually takes place within the International Book Arsenal Festival.

Theme of the Antytvir 2024 is “FRAGILE. Handle with care”.

Your experience with fragile objects, life beings, worlds, and fragile self, matters. It is a valuable evidence of our emotional and spiritual resilience against harshening and numbness dictated by our hostile reality. This experience deserves to be described and shown to the world as if it were a delicate and exquisite flower gently held in your open palms

—the team members note.

Read more about this year’s topic.

We suggest participants to reflect on the following aspects of fragility:

  • the soft power that your vulnerability can grant you and its role in life
  • the fragility of material and non-material objects, as well as living beings
  • your own experience with fragility, vulnerability, and sensitivity

To participate in the project, you need to:

  • study in grades 8-11
  • attach your work to the application form. The text should be in Ukrainian or English, up to 15,000 characters, with spaces in pdf format. The image should be in jpeg format. Participants can submit only text, or only illustration, or text and illustration together. Only one entry will be accepted.

The deadline is April 14th, 23:59. Upon the technical selection of works (checking for compliance with the language, volume of text, and image format), your works will be published on the Book Arsenal website. The works of 20 shortlisted participants will be published in a printed collection of Antytvir works in Ukrainian and English languages.

The educational programme for the participants will be held in the month of April. It includes a series of online workshops by creative writing professionals, writers, and illustrators.

Antytvir 2024 is organized in cooperation with Art Arsenal Community NGO. The project is supported by Partnership Fund for Resilient Ukraine (PFRU), funded by aid from the governments of the United Kingdom, Canada, the Netherlands, the United States of America, Finland, Switzerland, Sweden.

View the Antytvir works from previous years here:

Antytvir 2023
Antytvir 2022
Antytvir 2021

The greatest value of the project for me is that it creates a space where teenagers can freely express their opinion and be heard, and also find an environment of like-minded people from all over the country

– Julia Konopliana is a mentor of the educational program of Antytvir 2023, curator of Teenside teenage editorial board.