More than 60 pupils and high school children have been awarded with prizes and diplomas at the XVII Palm Sunday Contest for Young Poets and Writers, held annually ahead of the Sunday before Easter. This year’s grand prix went to Nicolae Potang, an eleventh grader at the Balti-based Mihai Eminescu High, Info-Prim Neo reports. The Palm Sunday Contest is and will always be an event that represents spring, the feast of creation and childhood, declared the deputy head of Chisinau’s Culture Dept Ianos Turcanu. As he put it, the definition that would best describe this competition is: “a window that is open to the world of creation and which encourages all those who love literature”. This year the competition brought together some 1,200 children from all over Moldova and from Romania. The presented poems, novels, short stories and essays are written in Romanian, as well as in Russian, Bulgarian and the Gagauz language. The grand prix winner participates for the third year in a row in the Palm Sunday Contest. Nicolae Potang confesses he has overcome a gloomy phase in his creation when he was imitating Bacovia’s poetry (e.n. – George Bacovia was a Romanian symbolist poet, known for his morbid style) and now embraced romanticism. Inspired by everything that surrounds him – the girls, the school, and vagrant dogs – the young poet has adopted the verse libre and calls himself an “urban poet”. The jury was composed by esteemed writers and journalists. The chairman of the jury, children’s writer Victor Prohin expressed his joy for the fact that all the children have been sincere and displayed artistic sensitivity and metaphorical thinking. He also said he was pleased to discover how deep children can feel adults’ problems. The jury’s members have observed that the central figures in children’s creations are their parents who left abroad. Most of them also write about how much they miss their mothers. In 17 years of existence, the contest has brought together more than 8,000 children, including from Romania. “Palm Sunday-2008” was organized by Chisinau’s Culture Department and the National Youth Creation Center.