Ivana Bodrožić’s novel 'Sons, Daughters', translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać, wins the EBRD Literature Prize 2025.

07/07/2025

Ivana Bodrožić won the EBRD Literature Prize 2025 with her novel "Sons, Daughters" (translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać) at the celebrating ceremony in London at the headquarters of European Bank for Reconstruction and development.

Praised by the jury as “fiction that has the power to transform how we see the world, others and ourselves” the UK edition of the novel "Sons, Daughters", translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać, and published by Seven Stories Press UK, claimed its second award (Meša Selimović Award) after being shortlisted for Italian Premio Rapallo BPER Banca 2023, and longlisted for prestigious Dublin Literary Award.

The writer, critic and cultural journalist Maya Jaggi (chair) said: “With invigorating candour 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. 

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.”

The authors and translators of the other two finalist books 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.