LIVE! Arditi Essay Competition Final Award Ceremony

On June 30th, AUA will host an award ceremony at the Alex and Marie Manoogian Hall to honor the winners of an essay competition announced by the Arditi Foundation among Armenian and Turkish university students. The award ceremony will be followed by a reception. 

The Arditi Foundation presented the following criteria to the competitors:

• The story takes place in the year 2025.
• Two students meet at Geneva University. One of them is Armenian, the other Turkish.
• Who are they? What is their story? What thoughts do they share? What thoughts do they hide? how does their relationship evolve?
• The rest is up to each participant’s imagination.

There are 3 winners from each participating university whose winning authors will receive awards of US $2,000, $1,000 and $500, provided by the Arditi Foundation. The winning university students from Turkey and Armenia will be present at the ceremony to accept their awards. 

All the 1st place winning stories from the participating universities were submitted for a final competition round, and the anticipated 1st place winner will be announced for the final prize of US $5,000. The top story will be selected by a team of referees consisting of the members of the board of the Arditi Foundation and representatives from the participating universities.

Among the AUA student-submitted stories, an internal AUA committee selected the top three, and the winning story has been submitted to the final competition round.

The competition began in early January of 2016 and was closed in late April of 2016. The purpose of the competition is strictly artistic. In order to obtain a literary quality, it is essential that each participant puts herself or himself in the shoes of each character, and uses its best efforts to understand him or her, even when being in personal disagreement with the character’s ideas or values. 

The AUA Jury Committee selected these winning essays:

First Place:  Ani Baghumyan for essay (in Armenian) titled “Մի քաղաքի պատմություն”

Second Place: Anna Grigoryan for essay (in Armenian) titled “Մարդիկ Թեյի Մեջ”

Third Place:  Donara Sargsyan for essay titled “The Test”