Omeljan Pritsak Book Prize in Ukrainian Studies

2020 Recipient

Simone Attilio Bellezza

The Shore of Expectations: A Cultural History of the Shistdesiatnyky

The Omeljan Pritsak Book Prize in Ukrainian Studies, established in 2019 and sponsored by the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University, recognizes a distinguished book in the field of Ukrainian studies that was published in the previous calendar year. Omeljan Pritsak was an esteemed scholar of Ukrainian history and the primary founder of the Harvard Ukranian Research Institute.

Winner: Simone Attilio Bellezza
Title: The Shore of Expectations: A Cultural History of the Shistdesiatnyky (CIUS Press)

In a year when there were many worthy books under consideration for the Omeljan Pritsak Book Prize for the best work in Ukrainian studies in a wide variety of fields including politics, history, sociology, anthropology, folklore, literature, and musicology, the committee has chosen Simone Attilio Bellezza’s The Shore of Expectations: A Cultural History of the Shistdesiatnyky (published by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press) as the winner of the 2019 award. The book offers a comprehensive, expansively researched, and well written history of a particularly significant phenomenon in Ukrainian cultural and political development – the poets and writers of the sixties, who were enormously significant in raising Ukrainian national consciousness during the Soviet era. The book should become the starting point for further research on the Shistdesiatnyky and that period of Ukrainian intellectual and cultural history for years to come.