Kateryna Yehorushkina's book “My Forced Vacation” won the Peter Pan Award

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The Peter Pan Award was founded in 2000 by the Swedish branch of IBBY and the Gothenburg Book Fair. It is awarded every year to a foreign author for a translated children's or youth book of “high quality both from a literary and thematic point of view”. Foam and won a silver star. The writer announced this on her Facebook page.

In 2024, the book Socker i mjölken by Thrity Umrigar and Khoa Le received the “Golden Star” award. The Swedish translation of Kateryna Yehorushkina's book “My forced vacation” was awarded the “Silver Star”.

To be honest, I didn't expect anything, because last year a golden star was given to a Ukrainian book. Therefore, it was a pleasant surprise, – wrote the author.

Along with Egorushkina, the book Rädda Sorya – Chang och solbjörnen by Trang Nguyen and Jeet Zdung (Trang Nguyen & Jeet Zdung) received the “Silver Star”.

Thanks to the combination of old and new in the images and text, the excellent translation, and the message that is needed in our turbulent times, Socker i mjölken is a worthy winner, said the award jury.

More about the book:

“My forced vacation”was published in 2022 by the Vivat publishing house with illustrations by Sonia Avdeeva and a practical appendix by child and family psychologist Svetlana Roiz. In Sweden, the book was published by Forlaget Hjulet in a translation by David Shibek. At the end of the book, the entire text is reproduced in Ukrainian, so that even those who came from Ukraine to Sweden could read this story.

In the annotation to the book, it is said that the vacation of the main character was caused by the war. Together with her parents and younger brother, the girl moves into the basement of her high-rise building, hiding from shelling. In the course of the story, the family tries to adapt to the new reality.

An incredible coincidence is that one of the families that became the prototypes of the characters moved to live in Sweden because of the invasion, and now they give friends a book about themselves in Swedish, – the author herself wrote.