Ukraine's Shevchenko Prize Unveils 2027 Long List of 110 Works in 14 Categories

The committee that runs Ukraine's Taras Shevchenko National Prize, the country's highest honour for culture and the arts, has published the long list for its 2027 edition. A total of 110 works across 14 categories have made it into the first round. The committee announced the list on its Facebook page on the evening of 11 November, and the details were reported by LB.ua and Detector Media.

A new category and a wide field

Founded in 1961, the Shevchenko Prize remains Ukraine's most prestigious creative award. This year it has grown: according to Detector Media, a presidential decree issued in July 2026 added architecture as a new category.

The competing works fall into several broad areas:

• literature, covering prose, poetry, literary and art criticism, and journalism;
• music and concert performance;
• theatre and film;
• visual arts, photography, decorative arts and design;
• architecture;
• curation of cultural and artistic projects.

The literary contenders

The prose nominees include Vasyl Shkliar's novel Zaiachyi Kostel, Artur Dron's collection Heminhvei Nichoho Ne Znaie ("Hemingway Knows Nothing") and Serhii Cherepanov's novella Ryba Moiei Mrii. Among the poets are Borys Humeniuk, nominated for a collection of war poetry, as well as Halyna Kruk and Pavlo Vyshebaba.

In criticism, the nominees include Oleksandr Boron's studies of Shevchenko's work and a study by Viktor Neborak of Ivan Kotliarevsky's Eneida. The journalism category features historian Volodymyr Viatrovych's biography of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army commander Vasyl Kuk, war correspondent Andrii Tsaplienko, and a history of Ukrainian Radio by a team of authors led by Vadym Miskyi.

Music, stage, screen and photography

Some of the best-known names come from music. Sviatoslav Vakarchuk, frontman of Okean Elzy, is nominated for his original music and arrangements of Ukrainian folk songs for the drama-song Marusia Churai, based on Lina Kostenko's celebrated novel in verse. The Ivano-Frankivsk theatre production of the same work is in the running for the theatre award. Other music nominees include composer Volodymyr Zubytskyi, Pylyp Koliadenko and Andrii Khaiat, better known as KHAYAT, while pop star Tina Karol is competing in the curation category.

The film nominees include Dmytro Sukholytkyi-Sobchuk's Pamfir and Taras Tomenko's feature film about Kharkiv's Slovo building, home to writers persecuted under Stalin. In photography, Vladyslav Krasnoshchok's photobook Documentation of the War and Yulia Kochetova's project War Is Personal are on the list. The new architecture category includes Serhii Derbin's work on the first phase of Ukraine's National Military Memorial Cemetery.

What comes next, and why it matters

The long list is only the first stage. The committee will next name finalists and then the laureates. For reference, Detector Media notes that last year's long list came out on 10 November 2025, finalists were announced in mid-January and the winners were named on 9 March, Shevchenko's birthday.

The 2027 list offers a snapshot of Ukrainian culture during a full-scale war. Many nominated works deal with war, memory and history, and the arrival of an architecture category headed by a military memorial cemetery shows how commemorating the fallen is becoming part of the country's cultural landscape. At the same time, classics such as Marusia Churai are being reimagined for a new generation of audiences.