From December 20 to January 20, we received 122 stories from high school students. Ural writer and author of the novels "Petrov in the Grippe and Around It" and "Occulttrager," Alexey Salnikov, along with the contest jury, selected the best works.
66.RU, together with Mikhail Shelkov’s Empathy Foundation, have concluded the literary contest “Letters from Strangers” in support of the first Urals selection of the Gifted Girls & Brainy Boys Olympiad, which will start in February of this year.
The writer shared impressions of the read works and wrote a heartfelt message to all the participants.
Alexey Salnikov, the author of the novels “Petrov in the Grippe and Around It” and “Occulttrager”:
“It was pleasant to see in the texts that you still differentiate between everyday speech and literary text, and the latter from social media posts. As someone who is involved in all of these, not just because it’s a job, but because literature is essential, it was gratifying to see that here, new authors are growing, all in different ways. […] It makes me smile to see how casually and beautifully you handle language. Like the example of the ‘five-centimeter hairstyle’, which will stick with me forever. It’s true, a story is not a dictation, not a test: literature is beautiful because in it, you can do anything. That’s what makes it different from other, more visual forms of art. That is the power of literature.“
The founder of the Empathy Foundation, Mikhail Shelkov, congratulated all the winners of the literary contest. The entrepreneur is confident that there are many talented young people studying in Sverdlovsk Region, whom we will see in the final of the regional stage of the most famous humanitarian Olympiad in Russia.
Below is the list of winners. We will also provide links to their works. The Midjourney neural network helped us create illustrations for the stories.
Furthermore, there were so many intriguing stories that the organizers decided to award two more young talents as part of a special set of nominations: Kirill Makhayev (Verkhnyaya Salda) for “Unbearable Melancholy” and Ivan Chimbileev (Yekaterinburg) for his occult-bureaucratic story “He’s Back!” They will receive merchandise from Mikhail Shelkov‘s Empathy Foundation.
We will contact the winners to present them with their prizes. Congratulations to all the participants — you are the best!
Meanwhile, starting from February 1, all 10th-grade students in Sverdlovsk Region will be able to apply to participate in the regional stage of Gifted Girls & Brainy Boys and test their skills in the country’s most famous humanitarian Olympiad. Applications are accepted via the personal accounts section on the Golden Ratio Foundation’s website.
The organizers of the Gifted Girls & Brainy Boys Olympiad in Sverdlovsk Region are the Ministry of Education and Youth Policy in Sverdlovsk Region, Mikhail Shelkov’s Empathy Charitable Foundation, and the Golden Ratio Foundation for Support of Talented Children and Youth.