Author: Matthew Green
Translator: Iryna Reformator
Translation: English to Ukrainian

Aftershock follows the journey of veterans as they return from the battlefield into civilian life, exploring the hidden wounds of war—psychological trauma, moral injury, and the struggle to heal. Green presents vivid narratives of ex-servicemen and women whose return is marked by anguish, guilt, and dislocation, set against the broader evolution of military psychiatry from “shell shock” to modern PTSD. Through rigorous research and empathetic storytelling, Aftershock asks what it means “to survive peace” and calls for a more compassionate response to the long, often invisible cost of war.
Award Archive
Author: Iryna Vilde
Translator: Ali Kinsella
Translation: Ukrainian to English

Butterflies Under Glass by Iryna Vilde is a beautifully crafted coming-of-age story set in a diverse Ukraine on the brink of change. With warmth and psychological depth, Vilde follows a young girl’s journey toward self-understanding amid friendship, pain, and hope. Her prose recalls the emotional intensity of Elena Ferrante, yet it remains distinctly Ukrainian in its vision of independence and resilience. Long cherished at home, Butterflies Under Glass now reaches English readers as a rediscovered classic of world literature.
Award Archive
Author: Alex Averbuch
Translator: Oksana Maksymchuk, Max Rosochinsky
Translation: Ukrainian to English

This volume presents the first standalone English translations of a selection of poems by Alex Averbuch, drawn from his acclaimed collection The Jewish King (Kyiv, 2021), which was shortlisted for Ukraine’s Shevchenko National Prize. Averbuch’s work examines the region’s layered history—war, occupation, oppression, displacement—through the lens of personal and family stories. Many poems are rooted in archival “found texts”: letters from Ostarbeiters and Holocaust survivors, preserved in their original dialect and orthographic irregularities, creating a powerful, haunting “poetry of memory.” The volume’s final cycle confronts the current Russo-Ukrainian war, especially in Averbuch’s native Luhansk region, bearing witness to destruction, displacement, and resilience in the present day.
Award Archive
Author: Philippe de Lara
Translator: Dmytro Karatieiv
Translation: French to Ukrainian

Naissances du totalitarisme by Philippe de Lara offers a profound exploration of the origins and evolution of totalitarian ideologies in the twentieth century. Through an analysis of communist, fascist, and Nazi revolutions, de Lara reveals how political violence and systems of control take root and sustain themselves. His study sheds light on the mechanisms of fear, propaganda, and conformity that enable such regimes to flourish—and ultimately collapse.
For Ukraine, a nation that endured Soviet totalitarianism and now faces renewed authoritarian aggression, this book carries urgent relevance. It serves as both a historical reflection and a warning, deepening understanding of how democracy can be defended against its most dangerous enemies.
Award Archive
Author: Volodymyr Rafeyenko
Translator: Mark Andryczyk
Translation: Ukrainian to English

Petrichor: The Scent of the Earth After Rain by Volodymyr Rafeyenko is a profound meditation on war, memory, and the fragile boundary between life and death. Set amid Russia’s ongoing assault on Ukraine, the novel traces the intertwined lives of two families whose worlds are shattered and remade by violence. Maria, whose son Petro is born on the day the war in Donbas begins, searches for stability across cities and borders, while Viktor, a refugee from Donetsk, must again confront invasion and terror near Kyiv.
Through their intersecting journeys, Rafeyenko explores how the living and the dead remain bound by memory, love, and loss. Rich with allusions to Ezra Pound, Hans Christian Andersen, Ukrainian classics, and The Mahābhārata, Petrichor reveals how, even in the midst of devastation, language and imagination sustain the possibility of life.
Award Archive
Author: Amelia M. Glaser
Translator: Iaroslava Strikha
Translation: English to Ukrainian

Stories of Khmelnytsky: Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising explores the life and legacy of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the Cossack leader whose 1648 revolt against foreign rule helped shape the Ukrainian nation. Remembered as both a founder and a controversial figure, Khmelnytsky’s image has been reinterpreted for centuries across Ukrainian and Russian narratives. This collection brings together leading scholars to examine how his story has been used to define national identity and political legitimacy—and how those interpretations still resonate amid Russia’s war against Ukraine. Featuring essays by George Grabowicz, Frank Sysyn, Adam Teller, and others, Stories of Khmelnytsky invites readers to view history as a space for reflection, dialogue, and renewed understanding.
Award Archive
Author: Eugenia Kuznetsova
Translator: Alina Senchenko, Donato Mancini
Translation: Ukrainian to English

The Ladder by Eugenia Kuznetsova is a moving novel about a Ukrainian family suddenly displaced by Russia’s invasion. Just as the main character buys his dream home in Spain to escape his family, he finds himself hosting them—along with their friends and pets—after the war forces them to flee. In this tender, often humorous, story, Kuznetsova explores how love, tension, and resilience intertwine under the strain of exile and uncertainty. Drawing from her own experience as a refugee living in Spain, she captures both the absurdity and the heartbreak of displacement. Written in clear, compassionate prose, The Ladder offers a deeply human glimpse into the cost of war and the endurance of family ties.
Award Archive
Vortex: Vasyl Stus’ Selected Early Poetry (Вибірка з творів поза збірками та збірок: Круговерть, Зимові дерева, Веселий цвинтар)
Author: Vasyl Stus
Translators: Bohdan Tokarsky, Nina Murray
Translation: Ukrainian to English

Vortex: Vasyl Stus’ Selected Early Poetry is the first professional book-length volume of Stus’ poetry in English translation. The book features more than a decade of Stus’ work, from his earliest texts to the period before his arrest by the KGB in 1972. A book of bold experimentation and virtuoso poetic versatility, Vortex captures Stus’ artistic evolution and the shifting political landscape of the USSR during a crucial period of the 1960s and early 1970s, juxtaposing existentialism and love lyric, expressionist metaphors and Ukrainian history, metaphysical depth, and the powerful energy of dissent.
Award Archive
The Ukrainian Intelligentsia and Genocide: The Struggle for History, Language, and Culture in the 1920s and 1930s (Українська інтелігенція і геноцид: боротьба за історію, мову і культуру в 1920-1930-х роках)
Author: Viktoria A. Malko
Translator: Viktoria A. Malko
Translation: English to Ukrainian

Viktoria Malko examines the existential threats and ideological choices the Ukrainian intelligentsia faced as the first group targeted during the Holodomor genocide. Due to its influential patriotism and its leadership of Ukraine’s strong tradition of struggle for national liberation, the “brain of the nation”—the intelligentsia —became the epicentre of the Soviet-orchestrated genocide against Ukrainians. The Ukrainian Intelligentsia and Genocide is an illuminating study of a decade that traumatised Ukraine as a nation and has shaped its politics to this very day, written by a historian specializing in Modern Europe and World History.
Awards Archive
Ukraine, the Middle East, and the West
(Україна, Середній Схід і Захід)
Author: Thomas Prymak
Translator: Nadia Zavorotna
Translation: English to Ukrainian

This fascinating and fluidly written book is unique in that it is the first scholarly monograph to treat Ukraine’s relations to the world outside eastern Europe. Thomas Prymak addresses geographical knowledge, international travel, political conflicts, historical relations with religiously diverse neighbours, artistic developments, and literary and language contacts to smash old stereotypes about Ukrainian isolation and tell a vivid and original story. The volume gives substance to Ukraine’s claim to an independent existence across the centuries and puts Ukraine on the map of the world, for historians, art museums, cultural institutions generally, and for the wider public.
Award Archive