1 April 2026

Today the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) announced the shortlist for its 2026 Literature Prize, featuring ten books in English translation from nine of the countries where the Bank invests. Entries are open to publishers based in Europe, North America or in a territory where the Bank operates.  

The shortlist highlights a range of fiction which speaks to today’s urgent themes including the legacies of conflict and postwar society, displacement and exile, memory and intergenerational trauma, and speculative interrogations of power and identity. Several novels foreground intimate family dynamics and personal reckoning, while others expand into political odysseys or near-future dystopias that question how bureaucratic, technological and social systems shape human lives. 

The shortlist was selected by an independent panel of judges: writer, critic and cultural journalist Dr Maya Jaggi (chair); Albanian author Professor Lea Ypi; Nigerian novelist Professor Chigozie Obioma; and British nonfiction writer Marek Kohn. 

People and Trees: A Trilogy by Akram Aylisli (Azerbaijan), originally written in Azerbaijani and translated from the Russian by Katherine E. Young, is set in the mountains of Azerbaijan just after World War II. It chronicles the wrenching transformation of traditional Azeri society under Soviet rule.  

Death and the Gardener by Georgi Gospodinov (Bulgaria), translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel, is a novel spanning ancient Ithaca to present-day Sofia, exploring family life under communism through the story of a father, a son and an orphaned garden. 

Gospodinov won the 2023 International Booker Prize with his novel Time Shelter, also translated by Angela Rodel. 

In Late Summer by Magdalena Blažević (Croatia), translated from the Croatian by Anđelka Raguž, is a poetic novel based on personal experience that juxtaposes ordinary country life with the brutality of war. The book has also been longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award 2026. 

Bedbugs by Martina Vidaić (Croatia), translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać, is an insight into a psyche damaged not by the trauma of war, but by the intrinsic, and often isolating, difficulties of the human condition. Ellen Elias-Bursać’s translation of Sons, Daughters by Ivana Bodrožić, won last year’s EBRD Literature Prize.

On the Greenwich Line by Shady Lewis (Egypt), translated from the Arabic by Katharine Halls, is a novel which traces the absurdities of racism, austerity and bureaucracy in contemporary England. This is a story about systemic failure and human courage, and about London and its many lost souls. 

Eye of the Monkey by Krisztina Tóth (Hungary), translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet, is a near-future dystopia in which interwoven stories reveal the pressures of power, poverty and intimate relationships.

Sololand by Hassan Blasim (Iraq), translated from the Arabic by Jonathan Wright, is a collection of novellas exploring the complexities of exile through the multiple perspectives of refugees, victims of war and the pre-war culture of Iraq. Hassan Blasim was the first Arabic winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2014. 

Ice by Jacek Dukaj (Poland), translated from the Polish by Ursula Phillips, is a Trans-Siberian odyssey through political, criminal, scientific, philosophical and amorous intrigues. It leads the reader into an endless winter to confront something utterly alien. 

Rock, Paper, Grenade by Artem Chekh (Ukraine), translated from the Ukrainian by Olena Jennings and Oksana Rosenblum, is a gritty, realist depiction of Ukraine and the post-Soviet world. This book offers an affecting look into the life of someone suffering from PTSD. Rock, Paper, Grenade won the 2021 BBC News Ukraine Book of the Year Award. 

We Computers by Hamid Ismailov (Uzbekistan), translated from the Uzbek by Shelley Fairweather-Vega, is a poetic novel set in mid-1980s Paris, in which the protagonist builds a computer programme capable of analysing and generating literature. Ismailov’s book, The Devils’ Dance won the 2019 EBRD Literature Prize. 

Chair of Judges, Maya Jaggi, said: 

“My fellow judges and I were thrilled by the poetry, inventiveness and sheer audacity of fiction emerging from societies in transitional turmoil – even at war. Spanning the 1920s to the dystopian future, from south London to Siberia, our shortlist ranges from a newly translated classic from mountainous Azerbaijan that dared to challenge the ideology of the day, to a love-hate triangle with a misogynist psychiatrist in the heart of Europe, tracing how authoritarian power and flagrant inequality corrode intimacy and trust. From the epic and elegiac to the epistolary and auto-fictional, these writers’ bold formal experiments vary from a Polish sci-fi odyssey of counterfactual history asking what if the Russian revolution had never happened, and a Bildungsroman centred on a Ukrainian Afghan-war veteran with PTSD, to a moving meditation on grief for a gardener-father. Another is set in a time before artificial intelligence’s infiltration of publishing, when an Uzbek novelist imagined a computer-generated narrator fed on Persian poetry, spawning a Borgesian novel in ghazal form.

“In the first year of Iraqi authors’ eligibility for the prize, an educated woman’s scorn for sharia law under Islamic State heads a trio of novellas that scourge sectarian militias (at great risk to the writer) and champion the ‘daydreaming’ imagination. That trilogy, and a darkly comic absurdist satire on the bureaucracy of funerals far from home – also translated from the Arabic – are reminders that economic transition is often inseparable from the agonies of displacement. That several of these books, chosen by an independent panel of judges, were written in some form of exile, underlines the vital need to defend freedom of expression.”

Three finalists will be announced at the end of this month. The winning author and translator will be revealed on 2 July at a public awards ceremony and reception at the EBRD’s headquarters in London, attended by the judges and the finalist authors, translators and publishers. Prize money of €20,000 will be divided equally between the winning author and translator. The authors and translators of the other two finalist works will each receive €2,000.

More information about the EBRD Literature Prize and each of the shortlisted works can be found here.