The prize is awarded to new or emerging authors from EU member-states, and this year's winners were announced at the Frankfurt Book Fair on Tuesday.
Other winners include Anna Kim of Austria, Lada Zigo of Croatia, Laurence Plazenet of France, Viktor Horvath of Hungary, Kevin Barry of Ireland, Emanuele Trevi of Italy, Gunstein Bakke of Norway, Piotr Pazinski of Poland, Afonso Cruz of Portugal, Jana Benova of Slovakia, and Sara Mannheimer of Sweden.
According to the press release, each winner will receive 5,000 euros and, more importantly, priority for funding from the EU Culture Program to get their book translated into other languages.
Radvilavičiūtė received the prize for a collection of essays Tonight I Shall Sleep by the Wall.
This year's winners will be presented with their awards and celebrated at a ceremony in Brussels on 22 November, in the presence of Commissioner Vassiliou and leading representatives of the worlds of literature, culture and politics.
This Prize is open to the 37 countries involved in the EU Culture Program (27 EU member-states, as well as Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Iceland, Liechtenstein, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Montenegro, Norway, Serbia, and Turkey). Each year, national juries in a third of the countries nominate the winner authors, so that all countries in the program are represented over a three-year period.
Since the prize was launched in 2009, the EU Culture Program has provided funding for 32 of the 35 winners to have their books translated into different languages. To date, more than 100 translations in total, covering 19 languages, have received EU funding.
