The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) is pleased to announce 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.
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.
