Poet Halyna Kruk has been awarded the Horst Bienek Prize’s encouragement award. Kruk announced this on her Facebook page.
It is an international literary prize awarded since 1991 by the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. This year, the prize’s main award went to Albanian poet Luljeta Lleshanaku.
The prize is presented every two years in Munich. The main prize is worth €10,000, while the encouragement award is €5,000.
“Halyna Kruk’s poems bear witness,” the jury’s citation says. “Although they emerge in times of turmoil and uncertainty, the Ukrainian poet’s mastery is evident on every page. Precisely observed scenes and astonishing details allow us to sense the situation of her country, as well as the resilience of its people and its language—even those of us whom misfortune has so far passed by. Kruk’s poems remind us that a human being is something immeasurably greater than a heat trace in the scope of a sniper searching for a target.”