On November 26, 2005, the Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko posthumously awarded him the highest national title: Hero of Ukraine.

Vasyl Stus was born on January 6, 1938, into a peasant family in the village of Rakhnivka, Haisyn Raion, Vinnytsia Oblast (modern Ukraine) (province), Ukrainian SSR.

After secondary school, Vasyl Stus entered the Department of History and Literature of the Pedagogical Institute in Stalino (nowadays Donetsk University).

Following graduation, Stus briefly worked as a high school teacher of the Ukrainian language and literature in the village of Tauzhne [uk], in Kirovohrad Oblast, and then was conscripted into the Soviet Army for two years.

While studying at the university and during his military service in the Ural Mountains, he started to write poetry and translated into Ukrainian more than a hundred verses by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Rainer Maria Rilke.

On September 4, 1965, during the premiere of Sergei Parajanov's film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors in Kyiv's Ukrayina cinema, Vasyl Stus took part in a protest against the arrests of Ukrainian intelligentsia.

His next book of poetry Winter Trees (Зимові дерева) was also rejected, regardless of positive reviews from the poet Ivan Drach and the critic Eugen Adelgejm.

(“Z tabornoho zoshyta" [“From the camp notebook"], 1983).On May 14, 1980, prior to the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow, he was arrested and received a 10-year sentence for "anti-Soviet activity".

[4][5] In the closing speech from the defence Medvedchuk stated all of Stus' crimes deserved punishment; however, he also told the court that the defendant fulfilled his daily norm at the factory where he worked at the time, despite serious stomach problems.

[2] In a 2018 interview with The Independent dissident Yevhen Sverstiuk also recalled: "When Stus met with his appointed lawyer, he immediately felt that Medvedchuk was a man of the Komsomol-aggressive type, that he did not protect him, did not want to understand him and, in fact, was not interested in his case.

Unfortunately, he died.”[7] Vasyl Stus died after he declared hunger strike on September 4, 1985, in a Soviet forced labor camp for political prisoners Perm-36 near the village of Kuchino, Perm Oblast, Russian SFSR, where he had been transferred in November 1980.

In August 1990 the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union canceled Stus' verdict and the case was closed due to lack of evidence.

[11] On 19 November 1989 the remains of Vasyl Stus, Oleksa Tykhy and Yury Lytvyn were brought back to Kyiv and reburied at the Baikove Cemetery in a ceremony attended by more than 30,000 people.

This Prize was set up by the Ukrainian Association of the Independent Creative Intelligentsia, and is awarded every year on the poet's date of birth in Lviv.

[24] In October 2020, a Ukrainian court banned the distribution of Vakhtang Kipiani's book, The Case of Vasyl Stus, following a complaint by Viktor Medvedchuk.