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- EBRD’s annual literature prize opens for entries
- Award celebrates newly translated literature from economies where the Bank invests
- New independent judges for 2026 include Albanian academic and author Lea Ypi and Nigerian writer Chigozie Obioma
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) has launched the EBRD Literature Prize 2026.
The Prize is awarded to a work of fiction translated into English from a language of an economy where the Bank currently invests and published for the first time in the past year.
Submissions of novels, or collections of short stories by a single author, are invited until 8 December 2025 and will be considered by an independent panel of judges.
The judging panel will again be chaired by Dr Maya Jaggi in her third and final year as chair. Joining her on the panel as new judges for 2026 are Albanian academic and author Professor Lea Ypi, Nigerian writer Professor Chigozie Obioma and non-fiction writer Marek Kohn.
The winner will be announced at an awards ceremony at the Bank’s headquarters in London on 2 July 2026.
A prize of €20,000 will be awarded for the winning book, divided equally between the author and the translator.
For the first time, books by authors from Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Iraq, Kenya, Nigeria and Senegal are eligible, since these countries have all become EBRD recipient economies in the past year.
Translation is a key element of the prize and this expansion will mean that literature in an even wider range of languages comes to public attention through its translation into English.
Maya Jaggi is an award-winning writer, critic, cultural journalist and artistic director. She is a contributing art critic for the Financial Times and her cultural writing appears widely, including in The Guardian, where she was a profile writer and a lead fiction critic for more than a decade. She interviewedhundreds of writers on five continents – including 15 Nobel laureates in literature. Dr Jaggi was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2023.
Lea Ypi is Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science and a Fellow of the British Academy. She has been awarded the British Academy Prize for Excellence in Political Science and the Leverhulme Prize for Outstanding Research Achievement for her academic work. Her award-winning philosophical memoir, Free, has been translated into more than 35 languages. Her latest book, Indignity, was published in September.
Chigozie Obioma was born in Akure, Nigeria. His most recent novel, The Road to the Country (2024), was included in The Economist’s list of the best books of the year. His first two novels, The Fishermen and An Orchestra of Minorities, were both shortlisted for The Booker Prize and have been translated into 30 languages. He is the Helen S. Lanier Professor of Creative Writing and English at the University of Georgia and the programme director for the Oxbelly Fiction Writers retreat.
Marek Kohn is a writer of non-fiction who explores the implications of scientific thinking for ideas about human nature and society. His British-Polish background has informed his two most recent books, Four Words for Friend: The Rewards of Using More than One Language in a Divided World and The Stories Old Towns Tell: A Journey through Cities at the Heart of Europe. The latter has been shortlisted for the 2026 Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies.
The EBRD Literature Prize champions the literary richness of the Bank’s diverse regions of operation, which span three continents. It also celebrates the role of translators as “bridges” between cultures. Since it was first awarded in 2018, the prize has helped introduce English-language readers to a broad range of literature from countries such as Albania, Croatia, Czechia, Georgia, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Morocco, Poland, the Slovak Republic, Türkiye, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.
The eligibility criteria for the EBRD Literature Prize can be found here.