The contest for conferring the special prizes in honor of Prokopiy Saltykov, Leonid Laptsuy and Sergey Irikov for the best covering of themes on preservation and development of cultural legacy of indigenous northerners in native languages in printing editions was announced in Yamal, IA «Sever-Press» reports. Receiving of applications is being finished.

The regional department on affairs of indigenous ethnic minorities of the North is conducting this contest. Names of the owners of three prizes in 50 thousand rubles each will be announced by the results of the contest.

According to the information given to a correspondent of IA "Sever-Press" by a representative of the department on affairs of indigenous ethnic minorities Oleg Syugney, any author of Yamal, who writes in a native language – Nenets, Khanty and Selkoup – can become a participant. The department is receiving works on the themes "Native speech", "The community – yesterday, today, tomorrow", "Yamal is my home" and "Family" till the 19th of October. This year Yamalskiy district sent the biggest amount of applications for participation.

One of the terms of the contest is the following: works should be published in mass media, magazines or as a separate edition, as he notes. And, of course, they should correspond to criteria of speaking the mother-tongue, artistic merits of the text and significance of the topic.

The contest has been conducted in the region for the fourth time. It will allow finding many new names. Oleg Syugney notes only one problematic issue of the contest: there are not so many authors writing in Selkoup language. But this problem has objective reasons. Written speech of Selkoup people appeared relatively recently.

The year before last the organizers of the contest added the name of the famous pedagogue and enlightener Sergey Irikov to the names of the classical authors of Yamal Prokopiy Saltykov and Leonid Laptsuy. Sergey Irikov compiled the Selkoup dictionary.