Melnyk was awarded the prize for his novella Nobody Was Waiting for Any John, published in the literary journal Metai. The work appeared in the journal’s 11th issue in 2024.
The awards ceremony will take place on 23 June in Vilnius at the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore.
The jury comprised literary scholars Žydrūnė Kolevinskienė, Juratė Sprindytė and Dainius Vaitiekūnas, as well as writers Danutė Kalinauskaitė and Daiva Opolskaitė.
The Antanas Vaičiulaitis Literary Prize was established in 1994 on the initiative of the Department of Lithuanian Studies at the then Vilnius Pedagogical University, the editorial board of the journal Metai, and the Vaičiulaitis family.
The prize was created to preserve the literary legacy of Antanas Vaičiulaitis and to promote the development of contemporary Lithuanian short fiction. It is awarded every two years for the best short story published in Metai during that period.
Yaroslav Melnyk is a Ukrainian and Lithuanian writer, philosopher and critic. He writes in Ukrainian, Lithuanian and other languages and is the author of more than ten books. His Ukrainian-language prose has been shortlisted for the BBC Book of the Year Award on several occasions, while his novel Remote Space won the prize in 2013. His works have been translated into English, French, German, Italian, Romanian, Croatian and several other languages.