After publishing the call for the Vilnius Literary Residency 2024, Vilnius City of Literature received 105 applications from the authors residing in 27 Cities of Literature all around the world. The applications came from Poland, Latvia, Germany, Belgium, Indonesia, Scotland, Ireland, Italy, Canada, Pakistan, United Kingdom, Brasil, Bulgaria, South Africa, Ghana, Island, China, Australia, Portugal, Mexico, India and others. The most applications – 38 – were received from Ukraine.
After evaluating all applications received, two authors were chosen to participate at the residency. The selected authors are Ronan Ryan from Ireland and Tanya Pyankova from Ukraine. Congratulations to selected participants, the selection process was really tough!
Ronan Ryan (Ireland)
Ronan Ryan is an Irish writer, based in Dublin. His debut novel, The Fractured Life of Jimmy Dice, published by Tinder Press, was one of the Irish Independent Review’s ‘Books of the Year’ and a finalist for The Lascaux Prize in Fiction. His work has appeared in The Irish Times, Banshee, The Honest Ulsterman, The New Guard, Breakwater Review, Boston Review, and Action, Spectacle, and was a finalist for the Machigonne Fiction Contest and the Breakwater Fiction Contest and a two-time finalist for the Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction. He has won the CCI/The Well Review Award and bursary awards in literature from the Arts Council of Ireland and Dublin City Council, and held Writer in Residence posts at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris, the Kerouac House in Orlando, and the Heinrich Böll Cottage on Achill Island.
Tanya Pyankova (Ukraine)
Tanya Pyankova was born in Ivano-Frankivsk region. Poetess, novelist. She wrote three poetry collections and novels Rabbit queen, Sun in the hem and The sins of the other people and other. Co-founder and creative director of the Potion literary agency. She organizes festivals, creative literary and artistic events, performances, theater literary readings. She wrote a novel on Holodomor called „Вік червоних мурах“ (The Age of the Red Ants) for which she combined and assembled in an imagined place what she found in archive documents from that time. As she writes in the epilogue, her novel is about “the horrible, unjustifiable terror that the occupying state of Russia began against Ukraine in 1908 and is continuing to this day”. Laureate of International and Ukrainian literary awards: “Hranoslov” (2008), “Order of the Carpathian Knights” (2015), named after P. Kulish (2018), “Publisher’s Choice” diploma + “Special Mention for the most touching coverage of a social topic” of the “Coronation of the Word” Competition (2019), “Blagovist” (2020), O. Honchar Prize. O. Honchar Prize (2021), 3rd Coronation of the Word Prize (2021) for her novel about the 1932-33 Genocide. She received a scholarship from the President of Ukraine for young writers (2020), the Gogol Prize (2023), the Best Book of Prykarpattia Prize (2023).