The winners of the Hotlist 2025 Award for books by independent publishers were announced at the Frankfurt Book Fair, with the special prize going to Ukrainian writer Tamara Horikha Zernia’s novel “Donezk Girl.”
The 2025 Hotlist Award of 5,000 euros will go to März Verlag in Berlin for Viktor Geringer’s novel Die Liebe vereinzelter Männer (“The Love of Lonely Men”), translated from Brazilian Portuguese by Maria Gummitsch.
The Dörlemann ZuSatz special prize of 1,500 euros went to the Friedrich Mauke publishing house in Weimar for the novel “Donezk Girl” by Tamara Goriha Zern (translated by Annegret Becker, Lukas Jur, and Oleksandr Kratochvil; published under the title “Donezk Girl”). The novel had previously won the reader’s vote.
According to the jury members, they quickly agreed that it was a text of great relevance and literary accuracy, as its “narrative voice immediately immerses you in the plot, the pace is maintained throughout the work, and it also manages to combine formal risks with a clear, accessible narrative. The book is emotionally moving and at the same time politically relevant – it is a book that is not only worth reading, but also necessary.”
