The winners of the Debut prize for young fiction writers were announced on Monday at the Alexander Pushkin Museum in downtown Moscow. The ceremony started late because organizers were waiting for the arrival of Roman Bilyk, the frontman of rock group "Zveri," or Beasts, who received a special prize for "poetic language in contemporary music."

Debut launched in 2000 as a prize for the youngest generation of writers -- those aged 25 and under -- and has since gained a high profile, thanks not least to the constant public relations activities of its organizers, particularly the writer Olga Slavnikova. It has consistently drawn on the best resources of modern Russian literature by inviting acclaimed authors to join the jury.

This year the chairman was Yevgeny Popov, a writer who made his name in the 1980s; other members included scriptwriter and director Alexander Adabashyan, popular playwright Viktor Slavkin, cult author Andrei Gelasimov and the literary critic and Pushkin scholar Valentin Nepomnyashchy. Unlike the judges of a number of other prizes, all the jury members were professional authors.

The Debut organizers have always prided themselves on the cross-cultural and international nature of the prize: The only entry requirement, apart from age, is that the contestants write in Russian, and contributions are welcome from anywhere in the world. This year, submissions came from Latvia, Georgia, Germany and New Zealand. Nevertheless, the bulk of participants were from Russia's major cities, especially Moscow, indicating a high degree of centralization in cultural life today.

This year's "Debut" achieved one of the award's main objectives -- discovering new names. The main prize went to Dmitry Faleyev from Ivanovo for his novel "Cold Beer on a Sunny Afternoon" (Kholodnoye Pivo v Solnechny Den); the short prose award was won by Alexander Snegiryov from Moscow for a short story collection; Alexander Gritsenko, another Muscovite, took the drama award for his play "The Carrier" (Nositel) about an HIV-positive young man; and the scriptwriting category was won by Anastasia Chekhovskaya from Ulyanovsk with her story "The A-Student" (Otlichnitsa).

All of these young authors were previously virtually unknown in the writing community. The only exceptions were Dmitry Biryukov from Novosibirsk, the winner in the journalism category, and the winning poet, Alla Gorbunova from St. Petersburg; Biryukov's articles have been circulating on the Internet for a while, and Gorbunova has attracted critical attention with her exquisite and unusual style.

All the winners receive a statuette of a bird and the opportunity to sign publishing deals with a guaranteed author's fee of $3,000.