BAKU, Azerbaijan, June 25. Sons, Daughters, a novel by Ivana Bodrožić, translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias- Bursać and published by Seven Stories Press UK, has won the EBRD Literature Prize 2025, Trend reports, citing EBRD's latest reports.
The winning work, published in English for the first time last year, was chosen by an independent panel of judges: the writer, critic, and cultural journalist Maya Jaggi (chair); translator and Associate Professor in Ukrainian and East European Culture at University College London, Uilleam Blacker; writer and editor Selma Dabbagh; and writer and foreign correspondent for BBC News, Fergal Keane.
“With invigorating candor and freshness, Ivana Bodrožić’s Sons, Daughters is a tale told through three perspectives, each voice distinctively rendered in Ellen Elias-Bursać’s supple translation from the Croatian: a young woman with ‘locked-in’ syndrome, her lover trapped in a body he cannot recognize as his own, and a mother entombed by her upbringing. Hinting at the parts of ourselves we stifle and censor to fit in, its immersive narrative is alert to how past war and trauma infect the present," Jaggi said.
Jean-Dominique Bauby’s stroke memoir The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly meets Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, this is fiction that has the power to transform how we see the world, others and ourselves.”
"Always when you are in some kind of final, there is a little hope, but I'm really so happy to be among these beautiful writers, and I'm so honored to be selected for the longlist and then the shortlist, and then as a finalist. I think that we are much more similar than we think sometimes and that art and literature is that base where we can understand each other because the most powerful tool of literature is this process of identification while we are reading something," Bodrožić said.
“I was hopeful, but I hadn't expected it. And so it was astonishing. It's deeply gratifying to be involved in a process where translation is playing such a major role. As a finalist alongside two other such excellent books that I read and really enjoyed and admired the translations of. I think that for some reason these three books have such a focus on character, and I love that because so much of what's written these days is auto-fiction, and the idea of these wonderful characters that were developed in these novels is terrific,” Elias-Bursać noted.
The authors and translators of the other two finalist books were also awarded trophies and €2,000 each by EBRD Secretary General Kazuhiko Koguchi. They were: Forgottenness by Tanja Maljartschuk, translated from the Ukrainian by Zenia Tompkins and published by Bullaun Press in Ireland and by Liveright, an imprint of W.W. Norton & Company, in the United States; and The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story by Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones and published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.
Now in its eighth year, the EBRD Literature Prize celebrates the creativity of the regions where the bank operates. With entrants from across three continents, it helps to bring literature from a wide range of countries to a global readership through the art of translation.
The prize has already featured a broad range of novels and short-story collections from countries including Albania, Croatia, Czechia, Georgia, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Moldova, Morocco, Poland, the Slovak Republic, Türkiye, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.
The EBRD Literature Prize is funded by the bank’s shareholders and forms part of its Community Initiative, which engages the institution and its staff in philanthropic, social, and cultural activities.
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