Expert Council on nominees and finalists for the second season of the Dar Prize

Shortlist for the 2026 Dar Prize

1. Igor Beloded The morning was the eye: [short stories]. — Moscow: Alpina Non-Fiction, 2024. — 304 p.
2. Zhenya Berezhnaya (Not) about war. — Riga: Medusa Publishing House, 2024. — 268 p.
3. Ksenia Buksha Little paradise. — Herceg Novi: Freedom Letters, 2024. — 136 p.
4. Ilya Danishevsky Damocles Techno. — Berlin: Freedom Letters, 2024. — 246 p.
5. Tatyana Zamirovskaya Evridika, check if you turned off the gas. — Warsaw: Miane Nema, 2024. — 451 p.
6. Александра Крашевская. Lullaby for Mariupol: Thirty Dreams Without Awakening. — London: Freedom Letters, 2024. — 120 p.
7. Alexander Motsar Only cacti survive in war. Notes from Bucha. — FRESH Verlag, 2024. — 81 p.
8. Grisha Prorokov Nothing but the heart: [novel]. — Papier-mâché, 2024. — 144 p.
9. Дмитрий Петров. Parents' Day. — KUST PRESS. — 280 с.
10. Oleg Radzinsky Days of Repentance. Novel. — BAbook, 2024. — 250 p.
11. Yuri Troitsky Schatz. — Берлин: Freedom Letters, 2024. — 140 с.
12. Evgeny Feldman Dreamers versus astronauts. — BAbook, 2024. — 487 p.

In the public consciousness today, war is no longer seen as a local conflict (or conflicts), but rather as a state of the world. War goes beyond the front lines, affecting everyone, and the internal, personal experience of catastrophe, even just the constant feeling of its presence, changes our vision and our understanding of meaning, intruding into all areas of life. 

The significance of a literary award in the context of war, emigration, and debates about the possibility and necessity of engaging in literature lies in particular in making visible those literary statements that say something important about contemporary reality, which is increasingly falling apart at the seams and losing all foundation. And from this point of view, literature is much more insightful than journalism, political and social analysis.

As in the shortlist for the first season of Dara, this year's list of finalists includes a significant number of works with a clear diary-like, documentary basis. The books by Alexandra Krashevskaya and Alexander Mozar can be classified as documentary evidence. 

Yevgeny Feldman’s book about the Russian protest movement is unquestionably important, because it shows from within what led up to February 22 and addresses the painful question everyone keeps asking: why. In this sense, the position from which the author looks at his material, that of a photographer-reporter, produces the effect of ideal participant observation. And the way the book is written, with such detail and honesty, and the way it sustains a balance between objectivity and passionate involvement, deserves special mention.

Tatyana Zamirovskaya builds her narrative on diary entries. Grisha Prorokov's auto-fiction novel can be viewed as a kind of retrospective diary, a list of impressions and experiences, as can Zhenya Berezhnaya's book (Not) About War. Lyrical documentary style is perhaps the defining feature of Dmitry Petrov's story “Parents' Day.” Even Oleg Radzinsky's seemingly canonical novel “Days of Repentance” grew out of impressions from volunteer work and real stories.

War is a machine of destruction not only because it kills and devastates physically, but also because it devours from within everyone it touches in one way or another. In its ongoing catastrophe, words are emptied out, nothing corresponds to them anymore, and things, now nameless, become estranged and resist comprehension. This rupture and this dissociation are present in virtually all the texts on the shortlist. Of course, in very different ways, and in ways that are absolutely incomparable. In one case, as Motsar writes, “everything that had been your world becomes disorderly scattered junk,” while in another, a person is “thrown out of their biography,” and everything on which their “self” had rested is compromised. They painfully search for grounds on which to assemble themselves anew. And the only thing they have is language, resistant, estranged, and poorly equipped to identify and generalize this new reality. 

In such cases, reality easily slips into fantasy, into the transcendent: into myth and science fiction in Zamirovskaya's work, into fairy tales in Danishevsky's. And in Ksenia Buksha's Little Paradise, a fictional small European country is chosen as the setting for a conversation about painful and hurtful topics (and again, about war, in the broad sense of the word). But the features of the catastrophe being experienced disrupt the magnificently constructed narrative, giving the text an inexplicable sense of anxiety. Reality is also split in Igor Beloded's collection of stories “The Morning Was an Eye,” where one of the main themes is the devaluation and meaninglessness of life. This is strange prose, masterfully, perhaps even too skillfully written, emphatically expressive. It seems to stand outside of time and, in this sense, stands out from other works. 

The catastrophic present and the anxieties of today cast a shadow on the past, forcing us to rethink and reinterpret it. This theme is explored in Tatyana Zamirovskaya's book and, quite unexpectedly, in Yuri Troitsky's adventure novel Schatz. At the center of it are the criminal and commercial adventures of the main character, an ordinary person, a typical middle-ranking businessman. But the tragic ending of the novel, directly linked to the events of February 22, 2022, forces us to perceive both the fate of the hero and pre-war Russian reality in a completely different way. Finally, it is necessary to mention a work that did not make it onto the final list: it has already been translated into foreign languages. This is Esther Bol's book Crime. It is a profound text about the tragedy of war, its impossible moral dilemmas, and the tragic rift that occurred, which is so acutely felt today.