Ukraine’s Shevchenko Prize adds photography, honors Olena Hrom

For Ukrainian photographers, the biggest change is not just a new trophy. It is official recognition that the camera now belongs inside the country’s highest cultural canon, alongside prose, poetry, music, theatre, and cinema. By adding photography to the Shevchenko National Prize, Ukraine has elevated image-making from a supporting record of events to a protected part of the nation’s cultural memory.

The expansion took effect after a presidential decree signed in July 2025, and by the 2026 award cycle the prize had reached 13 nominations for the first time in its history. The new and revised categories were built to widen that cultural frame: “Creative Curatorship of Cultural and Artistic Projects,” “Photography,” and “Design” were added, “Literature” was split into “Prose” and “Poetry,” and the music field became “Concert and Performing Arts.” For working photographers, that change carries weight well beyond ceremony night. It gives documentary and artistic photography the same institutional legitimacy long reserved for the older literary and performing arts.

The 65th Shevchenko Prize ceremony took place in Kyiv on March 9, 2026, with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and First Lady Olena Zelenska in attendance. Zelenskyy said the prize continues even during the war and stressed that Ukrainian culture remains modern, vibrant, and alive. That message landed in a country where cultural institutions are not operating in peacetime conditions, and where every public recognition of art is also a statement about survival.

The first laureate in the new Photography category was Olena Hrom, honored for the photo project Stolen Spring. Yevhen Nyshchuk, head of the Taras Shevchenko National Prize Committee, said the expansion matches wartime realities and the need for psychological support through art. That logic is exactly what gives the new category its force: in a nation at war, photographs are not only images to be admired, they are evidence, testimony, and part of the historical record. By naming a photographer as a Shevchenko laureate, Ukraine has said plainly that witnessing is cultural work too.