Award Ceremony - EU Prize for Literature

The portraits of the winners

José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission handed out the awards of the first ever EU Prize for Literature together with the Ambassador for this year's prize, Henning Mankell, and the former, Commissioner for Education, Training, Culture and Youth, Jan Figel’.


The prize aims at putting the spotlight on the creative and diverse wealth of Europe’s contemporary literature, promoting greater circulation of literature within Europe and interest in non-national literary works.

The Prize consists of an award to a talent from each of the participating countries in 2009, 2010 and 2011 respectively. The 12 countries selected for the 2009 Awards were: Austria, Croatia, France, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia and Sweden.


The new emerging talents were selected on the basis of requirements stipulated by the European Commission: The authors are a citizen of one of the 12 countries selected; the authors have published between 2 and 5 books of fiction and the books should have been published during the five years before the prize.

Experience the highlights here!