The International Book Arsenal Festival invites teenagers to participate in the Antytvir 2025 project and become one of the authors published on the The International Book Arsenal site or one of the 5 teen choice shortlist nominees.
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 2025 is “Closer Than It Seems”. The authors behind the concept are members of the teenage creative writing project LitLab Teens.
We invite you to reflect on the subtle feeling of closeness—to people, to places, to events. About the moments of its recognition and manifestation. Its birth and disappearance. Write in what forms it comes to you. Or draw. As always, we do not limit your creative freedom to any formats
— the authors note.
Read more about this year’s topic.
We suggest participants to reflect on the following aspects of closeness:
- the subtle feeling of closeness—to people, to places, to events. In what forms does it come to you?
- the moments of its recognition and manifestation, its birth and disappearance from your own experience;
- ability (or inability) to measure the distance between human hearts or calculate the distance between yourself five years ago and yourself now.
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.
- grant us access to your work on a cloud storage service you use.
The deadline is April 30th, 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. 5 participants will be shortlisted by our teenage jury and become visitors and collaborators to this year’s International Book Arsenal Festival in Kyiv, Ukraine.
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- “Fragile! Handle with care”. Antytvir-2024. Photo by Oleksandr Popenko
View the Antytvir works from previous years here:
• Antytvir 2024
• Antytvir 2023
• Antytvir 2022
Book Arsenal is organized in cooperation with Art Arsenal Community NGO. The festival is supported by the International Renaissance Foundation.