Yevhen Bilousov is the recipient of nearly two dozen awards, including the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Award for children’s literature, conferred by the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) in Basel, Switzerland, for his story “The Tale of the Little Kopeck and the Big Hryvnia.”
He is a professional historian, who fell in love with Ukrainian history as a boy. He read a lot on the subject and later made it his field of studies. Over time his hobby turned into the large scale publishing project The Glorious Names of Ukraine, a series of 10 volumes in which the author recounts Ukrainian history through its most outstanding personalities: princes, hetmans, warriors, and statesmen. These books are popular with both young people and adults, and especially with schoolteachers.
The Crimean cabinet recently adopted Bilousov’s unique program entitled For Children about Famous People from the Crimea. The author is waiting for his book Lesia’s Song to come off the presses. It is a story about Lesia Ukrainka’s childhood. Bilousov has explored Lesia Ukrainka museums in Novohrad-Volynsky, Kyiv, and Yalta. He reveres the brilliant Ukrainian poet and her celebrated mother Olena Pchilka. There is every reason to expect that his latest book will be popular with young readers.
I became familiar with Bilousov’s creativeness through The Glorious Names of Ukraine and his book Taras’s Pen, a story about Taras Shevchenko’s childhood. The book, which has an unexpected and original ending, amazed me. Here you find fairy-tale characters, like Magic Pen, Dark Cloud, and many others. They live and communicate with each other, even argue. This book is definitely meant for children. Even the tiniest readers will appreciate the story.
Bilous has special feelings for Shevchenko. His father, judge advocate Vasyl Bilous, gave his son a copy of the Kobzar on his 10th birthday. That was how Vasyl started his home library. The Kobzar still holds a place of honor there. Eventually he decided to write his own story about Taras’s life. He took his time thinking about it and then decided on a fairy-tale kind of story. His book Taras’s Pen is long- awaited by the author and his readers; Ukrainian Shevchenkiana has long needed an inspired story like Bilous’s.
Bilous resides in the Crimea. For many little Ukrainians his books have marked the stepping stones to the mother tongue. Last spring he presented Sevastopil’s school children with a library stocked with the best publications, including his own books.
