By Kate Powell
Award celebrates newly translated literature from countries where the Bank invests
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) has announced the launch of the EBRD Literature Prize 2025.
The Prize is awarded to a work of fiction originally published in a language of a country where the Bank invests, translated into English and published for the first time in the past year by a European (including UK) or North American publisher.
Submissions of novels, or collections of short stories by a single author, are invited until 6 December 2024 and will be considered by an independent panel of judges. The winner will be announced at an awards ceremony at the Bank’s headquarters in London on 24 June 2025.
Prize money of €20,000 will be awarded for the winning book, divided equally between author and translator.
The judges
The judging panel for 2025 will be chaired once again by the award-winning writer, critic, cultural journalist and artistic director, Maya Jaggi. Dr Jaggi 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 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.
Maya Jaggi will be joined by Fergal Keane, Selma Dabbagh and Uilleam Blacker.
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 is a British-Palestinian writer and lawyer. Her first novel, Out of It, was nominated for a Guardian Book of the Year award. 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 Arabic, French and English. Dr Dabbagh is a former judge of the Society of Authors’ McKitterick Prize.
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.
The EBRD Literature Prize champions the literary richness of the Bank’s diverse regions of operation across 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.
