New play by Dmytro Ternovyi makes it to the finals of the National Radiodrama Contest

A play by Dmytro Ternovyi, actor and manager of the Theatre na Zhukah (Kharkiv, Ukraine) made it to the short list of the first radio plays contest organized by the Mystetskyi Arsenal, the British Council and the Ukrainian Radio. The winner of the contest will be broadcast nationwide in January of the coming year.

According to the official statement of the organizers, the jury picked Top-10 works out of 192 submitted to the contest, including “Ward No. 7” – a radio play by a playwright from Kharkiv.

The finalists were drawn by the jury comprising of Hanna Veselovska (theatre historian), Natalya Vorozhbit (playwright), Nelya Danilenko (Radio Culture producer), Bohdan Zholdak (writer), Yaroslava Kravchenko (theater producer) and Oksana Shchur (academic advisor with the Literature Laboratory of the Mystetskyi Arsenal).

On the next stage, the authors are expected to finalize their works during the 4-days’ master class late in September, given by Mrs Frances Byrnes (U.K.), a playwright and author of plays made for BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4. After the final brush-up, the jury will once again review the texts and decide the winner.

Joint British-Ukrainian project aims to promote the radiodrama genre in Ukraine. It includes training course by the radio producer Matt Thompson (UK) for directors and producers of the Ukrainian radio stations and online platforms willing to try the radiodrama.

In 2013, Dmytro Ternovyi won the main drama contest in Eastern Europe “Talk about borders. Living in the age of change”, as his piece “Detalizatsiya” was published in several European languages and staged in Germany and France. In 2016, the author and his piece “39 or the Bus of Apocalypse” won the national literary festival “Kalmius” (nomination – “dramatic art”).