The independent jury of judges for the EBRD Literature Prize 2023 are: Toby Lichtig (Chair of Judges), Maya Jaggi, Arkady Ostrovsky and Natasha Randall.
Toby Lichtig is the Chair of Judges for the 2023 EBRD Literature 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. He served as Chair of Judges for the 2021 and 2022 editions of the EBRD Literature Prize.
Additional judges of the independent panel for the EBRD Literature Prize 2023 include:
Maya Jaggi is an award-winning writer, critic, artistic director and cultural consultant in London. She was a profile writer and fiction critic for Guardian Review for a decade (when she was a finalist for the Orwell Prize for Journalism), and a contributing art critic for FT Weekend for a further decade. Her cultural writing has also appeared widely, from the New York Review of Books and Economist to New York Times, and she is Critic at Large for Words Without Borders in NYC.
Jaggi was Artistic Director of Britain’s first festival of Georgian writers in 2016 and of its online sequel with the British Library in 2021, Georgia’s Fantastic Tavern. She has given masterclasses in Ukraine and other post-Soviet countries as an EU Senior Expert in cultural journalism. She holds degrees from Oxford University and LSE, and an honorary doctorate from the Open University for her “transformative influence in extending the map of international writing.”
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 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.
The winners of the inaugural EBRD Literature Prize were announced on Tuesday 10th April 2018.
