EBRD Literature Prize

Overview
Eligibility
Judges
Past winners

The EBRD Literature Prize is an annual award for a work of literary fiction from a country where the Bank invests, translated into English and published in the past year. The €20,000 prize is split between the author and translator, with both receiving equal recognition for their work.

The Prize champions the literary richness of our diverse regions of operation across three continents. It also celebrates the role of translators as “bridges” between cultures. It helps disseminate a wide range of different voices to the English-reading public and a global audience. 

It has already introduced a broad range of literature from countries such as Albania, Croatia, Czechia, Georgia, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Moldova, Morocco, Poland, the Slovak Republic, Türkiye, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.

The EBRD Literature Prize is part of the Bank’s Community Initiative, which engages the institution and its staff in philanthropic, social and cultural activities. It was first awarded in 2018, with funding provided by the Bank’s shareholders. 

Timeline

October / submissions open
December / submissions close
March / shortlist
April / three finalists
June / winner announced at awards ceremony

Books are submitted in the autumn. In March, an independent panel of judges* selects a shortlist of the 10 best nominated works of translated fiction. They then choose three finalists a month later and the final winner is unveiled at an awards ceremony and reception held at the Bank's headquarters in the summer.

Prize money of €20,000 is divided equally between the winning author and translator. The authors and translators of the other two finalist works receive €2,000 each.

2025 Finalists

Forgottenness by Tanja Maljartschuk, translated from the Ukrainian by Zenia Tompkins and published by Bullaun Press in Ireland and by Liveright, an imprint of W.W. Norton & Company, in the United States

Sons, Daughters by Ivana Bodrožić, translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać and published by Seven Stories Press UK

The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones and published by Fitzcarraldo Editions

2025 Shortlist

Sons, Daughters by Ivana Bodrožić, translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać and published by Seven Stories Press UK
The Ukraine by Artem Chapeye, translated from the Ukrainian by Zenia Tompkins and published by Seven Stories Press UK
Too Great a Sky by Liliana Corobca, translated from the Romanian by Monica Cure and published by Seven Stories Press UK
Engagement by Ҫiler İlhan, translated from the Turkish by Kenneth Dakan and published by Istros Books
My Women by Yuliia Iliukha, translated from the Ukrainian by Hanna Leliv and published by 128 LIT
Celebration by Damir Karakaš, translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać and published by Selkies House Limited
Herscht 07769 by László Krasznahorkai, translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet and published by New Directions Publishing
Forgottenness by Tanja Maljartschuk, translated from the Ukrainian by Zenia Tompkins and published by Bullaun Press in Ireland and by Liveright, an imprint of W.W. Norton & Company, in the United States
Life After Kafka by Magdaléna Platzová, translated from the Czech by Alex Zucker and published by Bellevue Literary Press
The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones and published by Fitzcarraldo Editions

Watch: highlights of 2024 EBRD Literature Prize awards ceremony

2024 winner

The End by Attila Bartis, translated from the Hungarian by Judith Sollosy and published by Archipelago Books

_{* The EBRD Literature Prize is judged by an independent panel. The views and opinions expressed by the judges, publishers, authors and translators involved in the prize are their own and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views, policies, or positions of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD).}

Eligible publishers, please complete the online submission form. If you have any queries, contact LiteraturePrize@ebrd.com

In order for books to be eligible for the EBRD Literature Prize 2025, the following criteria must be met: 

a) The submitted works must consist of books of translated literary fiction (including collections of short stories by a single author) translated into English and written originally in any language, whether official or minority, of a country where the EBRD currently invests by an author who is (or has been) a citizen of one of these countries. 

b) The works may only be submitted by European (including UK) or North American publishers with a valid ISBN and the price printed in the currency of a European or North American country.  

c) The works must not be either self-translated or self-published. 

d) Submissions for the EBRD Literature Prize 2025 may only be made for books translated into English for the first time in the period between 15 November 2023 and 14 November 2024.

e) Submissions must be received by 6 December 2024. 

f) The EBRD may at its sole discretion decide to exclude a work from consideration. Such a decision is final. 

g) Any individual publisher may not submit more than one book per EBRD country of operations, but may submit a single book from more than one country of operations.  (As an example, a UK publisher may submit one book each from Morocco, Montenegro, Moldova and Mongolia, but not two from Mongolia).

h) The author and translator of the work must be living at the time it is submitted. 

i) Six copies of each work must be submitted to the EBRD, which will not be returned. 

j) The finalists (authors and translators) must agree to participate in the EBRD Literature Prize award ceremony at EBRD Headquarters in London. Travel expenses and accommodation will be covered by the EBRD. 

*Eligible countries include: Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Egypt, Estonia, Georgia, Greece, Hungary, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kyrgyz Republic, Latvia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, North Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Tajikistan, Tunisia, Türkiye, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan 

2025 judges

Fergal Keane

Fergal Keane is one of the world’s most experienced war reporters. As foreign correspondent for BBC News, he has reported from the front line of many conflicts, including in Afghanistan, Iraq, Northern Ireland, Rwanda, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan and Ukraine. He has won numerous prizes for his journalism, including BAFTA, Peabody and Emmy awards. He is the author of several books, including Season of Blood: A Rwandan Journey, which won the Orwell Prize, and most recently The Madness: A Memoir of War, Fear and PTSD.

Selma Dabbagh

Selma Dabbagh is a British-Palestinian writer and lawyer. Her first novel, Out of It, was a Guardian Book of the Year. Her fiction includes short stories and radio plays as well as productions for stage and screen. She is the editor of We Wrote in Symbols: Love and Lust by Arab Women Writers: an anthology of contemporary and classical short stories, poetry and other writing in English and translated into English from Arabic and French. Dr Dabbagh is a former judge of the Society of Authors’ McKitterick Prize.

Uilleam Blacker

Uilleam Blacker is a translator and Associate Professor in Ukrainian and East European Culture at University College London. He is fluent in Ukrainian, Polish and Russian and his translations of Ukrainian authors have been published in The Guardian, The White Review, Modern Poetry in Translation and elsewhere. He has also written for The Atlantic and The Times Literary Supplement. In 2022, Dr Blacker was Paul Celan Translation Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna and in 2023 he was a judge for the International Booker Prize.

Maya Jaggi (chair)

This is Maya Jaggi’s second year as Chair of Judges. She is an award-winning writer, critic, cultural journalist and artistic director. She is a contributing art critic to FT Weekend and was a profile writer and fiction critic for The Guardian Review for a decade, interviewing hundreds of writers on five continents, including 15 Nobel laureates in literature. Dr Jaggi is Critic at Large for Words Without Borders. She has an honorary doctorate from the Open University for “extending the map of international writing.” She was Writer in Residence at Writers’ House of Georgia in Tbilisi in 2022, and in 2023 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She has judged numerous international literary awards, including the 2024 Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Translation Prize.

Previous years' judges

Maureen Freely

Maureen Freely is the author of eight novels. Her most recent, My Blue Peninsula, was published in September 2023.  Well-known for her translations of the Turkish Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk, she has also brought into English several classics and works by Türkiye’s rising stars. Her translation of Cold Nights of Childhood by Tezer Özlü won the 2023 US National Book Critics Circle Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize, for the best book of any genre translated into English and published in the United States. In 2019 she served as a judge for the Man Booker International Prize.  For many years Professor Freely worked as a journalist in London, writing about literature, social justice, and human rights.  As chair of the Translator’s Association and more recently as President and Chair of English PEN, she has campaigned for writers and freedom of expression internationally.  She teaches at the University of Warwick.

Phillippe Sands

Philippe Sands is an author and renowned expert in international law.  He is Professor of Public Understanding of Law at University College London where he is also Director of the Centre of International Courts and Tribunals. He was called to the Bar in 1985 and appointed King’s Counsel in 2003. Philippe is a Barrister at 11 King's Bench Walk in London and is a respected expert in public law, arbitration, international law and environmental and natural resources.  From 2011 to 2013 he was a member of the independent Commission on a Bill of Rights, which was established by the UK Government. He has been a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School since 2019.

Professor Sands has authored numerous acclaimed books, including East West Street (2016) (awarded the 2016 Baillie Gifford Prize, the 2017 British Book Awards Non-Fiction Book of the Year, and the 2018 Prix Montaigne) and The Ratline (2020). His latest book, The Last Colony, A Tale of Exile, Justice and Britain’s Colonial Legacy, was published in September 2022. He is also a regular contributor and commentator on international law and justice in publications including The Guardian, Financial Times and The New York Times, and appears regularly on the BBC and CNN. He was President of English PEN for five years until April 2023 and is a member of the Board of the Hay Festival of Arts and Literature.

Toby Lichtig

Toby Lichtig was Chair of Judges for the 2023, 2022 and 2021 editions of the Prize. Toby is the Fiction and Politics Editor of the Times Literary Supplement (TLS). He is also a freelance editor and critic, and writes for a range of publications, including the Wall Street Journal and Guardian. Toby has appeared as a guest critic on various television and radio programmes, regularly interviews writers at various events and festivals, including Hay, and has also freelanced as a documentary producer. He was Chair of Judges of the 2018 JQ-Wingate Prize, and a jury member of the 2019 EU Prize for Literature.

Arkady Ostrovsky

Arkady Ostrovsky is the Economist’s Russia and eastern Europe editor. Prior to this role, he was the Moscow Bureau Chief for the Economist reporting on the annexation of Crimea and the war in Ukraine. Before joining the Economist in 2007, he spent a decade with the Financial Times covering Russia. He is the author of the 2016 Orwell Prize winning book The Invention of Russia: The Journey from Gorbachev’s Freedom to Putin’s War. He is regular contributor to radio and television programmes around the world, including the BBC and NPR. Arkady’s translation of Tom Stoppard’s trilogy, “The Coast of Utopia” and “Rock’n’Roll” have been published and staged in Russia.

Natasha Randall 

Natasha Randall is a writer, literary translator and Contributing Editor to literary magazine A Public Space. Her award winning translations include Dostoyevsky, Lermontov, Gogol and Zamyatin. Her articles and reviews have appeared in the TLS, The Moscow Times, The New York Times and others. Her debut novel, LOVE ORANGE, was published by riverrun (Quercus) in September 2020. 

Boris Dralyuk

Boris Dralyuk is a literary translator, a poet, and the Editor-in-Chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books. His work has appeared in the TLS, the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, London Review of Books, the Guardian, and other journals. He is the author of Western Crime Fiction Goes East: The Russian Pinkerton Craze 1907-1934; translator of several volumes from the Russian, including work by Isaac Babel, Andrey Kurkov, Maxim Osipov, and Mikhail Zoshchenko; editor of 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution; and co-editor of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (2015). Boris received first prize in the 2011 Compass Translation Award competition, and in 2020 won the inaugural Kukula Award for Excellence in Nonfiction Book Reviewing from the Washington Monthly. His collection My Hollywood and Other Poems will appear from Paul Dry Books in April 2022.

“The EBRD Prize is a gift not only for the international authors, the inspired translators, and the risk-taking presses who so richly deserve recognition for their vital contributions to our Anglophone culture, but for all readers who crave to connect with the broader world. We judges are among those lucky readers. What a privilege it is both to benefit from and to aid the cause.”

Alex Clark

Alex Clark is a critic, journalist and broadcaster. A co-host of Graham Norton’s Book Club, she is also a regular on Radio 4 and writes on a wide range of subjects for the Guardian, the Observer, the Irish Times and the TLS. She is a patron of the Cambridge Literary Festival, and has judged many literary awards, including the Booker Prize. She is an experienced chair of live events, and lives in Kilkenny, Ireland.

“I often reassure myself that, because I review books and interview authors for a living, I’m sure to keep across a wide range of writing. But it’s not always true - and I’m far from immune to the temptation of reading what I’m already familiar with. So I grabbed the chance of judging the ERBD prize - and I was right. Reading the submissions with Kathryn, Boris and Toby - all of whom brought different perspectives and skills as well as enthusiasm and the willingness to chat for hours on end - was a complete joy. I feel thoroughly invigorated and refreshed by it!”

Kathryn Murphy

Kathryn Murphy is a literary critic and scholar who reviews Czech literature for the TLS, and is a regular contributor, both as a reviewer and essayist, to Apollo: The International Art Magazine. She is a Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Oriel College, and an Associate Professor in the Faculty of English, University of Oxford. Her various interests include literature, theology, and philosophy in the seventeenth century; Central European literature; the literary essay; and still-life painting. Kathryn is co-editor of On Essays: Montaigne to the Present (Oxford, 2020) and a curator of the Bodleian exhibition Melancholy: A New Anatomy. Her book Robert Burton: A Vital Melancholy will be published by Reaktion in 2022.

“Judging the EBRD Literature Prize has been a joy: a chance to encounter remarkable books and characters, to read widely across languages and cultures, to learn about how the regions of the EBRD reckon with their histories, and to engage in celebratory discussions with my fellow judges. I’m left with deep gratitude for how fiction and translation invite us into new experiences, by taking local particularities of strife, suffering, and celebration, and making them legible across borders.”

Anna Aslanyan

Anna Aslanyan is a freelance journalist and translator from Russian. She writes for the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) and other publications. Her popular history of translation, Dancing on Ropes: Translators and the Balance of History, was published by Profile Books in 2021.

Julian Evans

Julian Evans is a biographer, travel writer and translator. He established himself on the literary scene with Transit of Venus (1992), an account of his journey across the Pacific Ocean to the US's nuclear-missile test range at Kwajalein Atoll. His most recent book is Semi-Invisible Man, an authorised biography of the writer Norman Lewis. Julian has written and presented radio and television documentaries and writes for English and French newspapers and magazines including the Guardian, Prospect, Daily Telegraph, Granta, Conde Nast Traveller, and L’Atelier du Roman. He translates from French and German and is a recipient of the Prix du Rayonnement de la Langue Française from the Académie Française. He is a Royal Literary Fund Consultant Fellow.

Kirsty Lang

Kirsty Lang is an experienced journalist and broadcaster. She spent many years as a foreign correspondent reporting for the BBC and the Sunday Times from eastern Europe and later Paris. In the UK she presented Channel 4 News and the BBC Radio Four daily arts programme Front Row. She spent six years as a Trustee of the British Council and continues to sit on the advisory board. She is also Chair of the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead and a visiting professor at University College London.

Rosie Goldsmith

Rosie Goldsmith was Chair of Judges for the first edition of the EBRD Literature Prize in 2018 and then again in 2019 and 2020. She is an award-winning journalist specializing in arts and foreign affairs and was employed by the BBC for twenty years. She has interviewed leading cultural and literary figures, from Margaret Atwood to Edmund de Waal, David Mitchell to Karlheinz Stockhausen. She now combines journalism with chairing and curating arts and literary events in the UK and across the world. She is a champion of international literature, translation and language learning and is Founder and Director of the European Literature Network and Editor-in-Chief of The Riveter magazine.

2024

The End by Attila Bartis, translated from the Hungarian by Judith Sollosy and published by Archipelago Books, won the EBRD Literature Prize 2024. The jury judged it to be “A tour de force by a novelist who is also a photographer: a devastatingly frank portrait of an artist under pressure in post-communist Hungary and the disintegration of a family in a police state. Restlessly experimental in its search for truth, and saving its biggest surprises for the final pages, The End can pivot seamlessly from a searing argument between a father and son to close observation of the random movement of an ant. With great originality, and an ultimate faith in the power of art, this novel will move and astonish readers around the world.”

2023

The Lake by Bianca Bellová, translated from the Czech by Alex Zucker and published by Parthian Books, won the EBRD Literature Prize 2023. The dystopian coming-of-age story was described by the Chair of Judges, Toby Lichtig, as “a bewitching, beguiling, terrifying and shocking portal into a world gone wrong, a realm in which tenderness and courage come up against brutality and indifference, in which fellow-feeling and communality are undercut by self-interest and folly – and in which small gestures nonetheless keep the flame of hope alive. It is utterly propulsive, immersive and unique, and deserves to become a European classic, to be read by many generations to come.”

2022

The Orphanage by Serhiy Zhadan, translated by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler is the winner of the EBRD Literature Prize 2022. Published by Yale University Press, and set in contemporary eastern Ukraine, the book is a raw, compelling story of a civilian’s desperate journey through conflict zones to reach home. Toby Lichtig, Chair of the judging panel said:” The Orphanage was timely when it first appeared in Ukrainian in 2017, it was timely when it first appeared in Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler’s excellent translation last year, and it is even more grimly timely now.”

2021

The King of Warsaw, a novel by writer Szczepan Twardoch and translated from Polish by Sean Gasper Bye was the winner of the EBRD Literature Prize 2021. Published by Amazon Crossing, the novel evokes late 1930s Warsaw as a world of violence and fast-living, criminal fraternities and political turmoil. Toby Lichtig, Chair of the judging panel, described it as “at once a pulp thriller, a linguistic feast, a historical tapestry and a devastatingly clever excavation of memory”.

2020

Devilspel, a novel by Grigory Kanovich and translated from Russian by Yisrael Elliot Cohen, won the EBRD Literature Prize 2020. Published by Noir Press, Devilspel evokes the lost world of Lithuanian Jews during the Second World War. Rosie Goldsmith, Chair of the independent judging panel for the EBRD Literature Prize 2020, described the winning novel as “a literary microcosm of world history related through the lives of ordinary people”.

2019

The Devils’ Dance, a novel by Hamid Ismailov and translated from Uzbek by Donald Rayfield (with John Farndon) won the EBRD Literature Prize 2019. Published by Tilted Axis Press, The Devils’ Dance is the first novel translated from Uzbek into English. The judges were Rosie Goldsmith (Chair), Gabriel Gbadamosi, Ted Hodgkinson and Samantha Schnee.

2018

Istanbul, Istanbul, a novel by the Turkish author Burhan Sönmez and his translator Ümit Hussein won the first EBRD Literature Prize in 2018. The judges were Rosie Goldsmith (Chair), Peter Frankopan, Lucy Hannah, and Gabriel Gbadamosi. This first edition of the EBRD Literature Prize attracted a wealth of submissions and introduced readers to a wide range of literature from countries as diverse as Albania, Croatia, Morocco, Russia and Türkiye. It also attracted events at the London Book Fair and Hay Literary Festival.

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