A memoir completed by a friend wins the 2025 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation
And the Walls Became the World All Around, by Johanna Ekström and Sigrid Rausing, has won the 2025 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation.
The 2025 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation has been awarded to And the Walls Became the World All Around by Johanna Ekström and Sigrid Rausing, translated from the Swedish by Rausing and published by Granta. The University of Warwick announced the result on 27 November 2025.
The book is a memoir built from thirteen handwritten notebooks that the Swedish writer Johanna Ekström, who died in 2022, asked her friend Rausing to complete. It was first published in Swedish in 2023.
The judges were Boyd Tonkin, Susan Bassnett and Véronique Tadjo. They highly commended Too Great a Sky by Liliana Corobca, translated from the Romanian by Monica Cure (Seven Stories Press UK). The prize received 145 eligible entries from 34 languages, and the shortlist of six drew on French, Hungarian, Korean, Romanian and Swedish.
Why it matters: the winning book blurs the usual lines between author, co-author and translator, and the prize's decision to recognise it shows how flexible those roles can be. Submissions for the 2026 prize opened on 1 April 2026, and the award remains one of the few in Britain that focuses on women writers in translation.
Sources: University of Warwick: 2025 winner announced; Warwick Prize for Women in Translation: 2025 winner.