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A film still from "Tag"

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A picture taken by Stefanova

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A film still from "Faithful"

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A photo from the London Book Fair

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The national film award, "Nika"

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The Big Book Award

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The cover of Olga Slavnikova's book, "Love in the Seventh Car"

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Nikolai Zvyagintsev
photo by Maksim Pavlov

PARTICIPANT HIGHLIGHTS

Participant Career Updates

Anna Russ (Open World, 2005) and Andrei Rodionov (Open World, 2007) participated in the main program of the 53rd Venice Biennial. The poets were part of the international literary performance, organized by the Moscow Poets Club. Documentation of the project and a list of participants can be found here.

The film, “Tag” (“Pyatnashki”) by Natalia Uglitskikh (Open World, 2008) won the prize for best short film at the last Boulder International Film Festival (Boulder, CO).

Olga Stefanova (Open World, 2008) is spending an entire year in Antarctica, where she will be shooting a film about the scientists that live there year-round at an Antarctic research center. She is blogging about her experience on her Livejournal (in Russian)

Faithful(Vernaya) by Anastasiya Tarasova (Open World, 2008) was screened at several prestigious documentary film festivals including: International Documentary Film Festival Documenta Madrid, Syracuse International Film Festival and London International Documentary Festival.

Dmitry Bykov (Open World, 2005), Olga Slavnikova (Open World, 2005), and Maria Galina (Open World, 2007) participated in Russian Literature Week, which ran from April 20th to April 26th, 2009, as part of the London Book Fair.

Awards, Prizes, and Publications

Many past Open World participants are among the nominees at the “NIKA” Film Festival. Bakur Bakuradze’s film Shultes (Open World, 2008) is nominated for best narrative film, best directing, and best screenwriting. All of this is Television (Vse eto televedeniye), directed by Dmitri Zavilgelsky (Open World, 2006), and The Song You Do Not Hear (Pesnya, kotoroj ni slyshno), directed by Aleksei Barykin (Open World, 2009) are also both nominated for Best Narrative Film. Everyone Dies But Me (Vse umrut i ya ostanus) and Live and Remember (Zhivi i pomni), both cowritten by Aleksandr Rodionov, are nominated for Best Screenwriting.

At the end of May, the finalists for the National Literature Prize, the “Big Book Award,” were announced. Among the 13 finalists were past Open World participants Olga Slavnikova for her collection of stories Love in the Seventh Car (Lyubov v sedmom vagonye) and Maria Galina for her novel Little Glusha (Malaya Glusha)

Little Glusha also made the long list for the “Yasnaya Polyana” literary prize, along with Little Victorious War (Malenkaya pobedonosnaya voina), a novella by Arkadiy Babchenko (Open World, 2006). Babchenko’s book Ten Stories About War (Desyat seriy o voinye) was mentioned in the New York Times Book Review in March of 2009.

Olga Slavnikova was also awarded the Yuriy Kazakov Prize for her short story The Cherepanova Sisters (Sestry Cherepanovy), published in the collection Love in the Seventh Car.

Elena Fanailova (Open World, 2007) won the prize of the journal Znamya for her poetic cycle “Baltic Journal”.

Yuliy Gugolev (Open World, 2005) received the poetry prize from the journal Oktyabr for his collection of poems published in issue 8 of the journal's 2008 cycle.

The Moscow poet Nikolai Zvyagintsev (Open World, 2008) received a Joseph Brodsky Fund grant. The award allows for the winner to spend the Fall of 2009 living in Rome and Venice.

101 Minutes (Sto i odna minuta) by Ekaterina Taratuta (Open World, 2007), and On the Use and Abuse of Letherburg for Life (O polzye i vredye Leterburga dlya zhizni) by Aleksandr Skidan (Open World 2005), were published in English translation on the international web-based journal Words Without Borders

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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