And the Walls Became the World All Around has won the 2025 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation.
The winner of the 2025 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation is And the Walls Became the World All Around by Johanna Ekström and Sigrid Rausing, translated from Swedish by Sigrid Rausing and published by Granta.
And the Walls Became the World All Around is a memoir consisting of 13 handwritten notebooks that Johanna Ekström (1970-2022) asked her friend Sigrid Rausing to finish. First published in Swedish in 2023, it has been described as a literary experiment, a continuation of 30 years of friendship, and a deep meditation on grief.
The 2025 prize was judged by Boyd Tonkin, Susan Bassnett, and Véronique Tadjo. The judges said of the winning title:
"Just as the end of life will take us into unknown territory, so this extraordinary book pioneers new ways of thinking, feeling and writing about losses of many kinds. Sigrid Rausing's completion of, and commentary on, her friend Johanna Ekström's final notebooks is not just a poignant and powerful double memoir: it is a record of a distinguished writer's last years and the friendship she inspired. Its language, beautifully chosen and artfully translated, helps us confront and understand grief and absence. But it also permits us to celebrate a unique inner life of dreams and visions that now survives in memories, and words."
Johanna Ekström made her debut aged 22 with the poetry collection Skiffer, followed by 13 books in a variety of genres, amongst them the celebrated memoirs Om man håller sig i solen (2012) and Meningarna (2020). Sigrid Rausing is the author of three previous books, including Mayhem (2017).
The judges have highly commended Too Great A Sky, by Liliana Corobca, translated from Romanian by Monica Cure and published by Seven Stories Press UK, saying:
"This prose epic not only tells an astonishing, but largely forgotten, story of suffering and endurance amid the terrors of total war; Liliana Corobca also turns her historical research into the experience of Romanians deported by Soviet authorities from Bucovina to Kazakhstan into captivating fiction. In Monica Cure's immersive translation, the narrator's voice seasons horror and upheaval with humour, resilience and folkloric charm as she recounts the ordeal of the deportees and the ways they survived it. This mighty, moving novel transforms fact into art, and brings ancient storytelling skills to bear on modern tragedies."
The winner was chosen from a shortlist of six titles that included translations from French, Hungarian, Korean, Romanian and Swedish. Commenting on the shortlist, the judges added:
"This year, more than ever, the shortlist for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation proved that great writing crosses boundaries of place, of culture - and of form. Our winner shapes a writer's final words and her translator's response to them into a unique testament of creativity, friendship and grief. Our highly commended title takes interview-based documentary material and uplifts it into a fictional narrative of resounding impact and authority. Across the shortlist, six outstanding women writers convert memory and history - private or public - into independent works of literary art. And we can read them in English thanks to the transformative magic of their gifted translators."
The prize launched in 2017 with the aim of addressing the gender imbalance in translated literature and increasing the number of international women's voices accessible to a British and Irish readership. In 2025, the competition received 145 eligible entries from 34 languages.
Submissions for the 2026 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation will open on 1 April 2026.
