We’re thrilled to announce that Sarai Kirshner has won the 2025 Fitzcarraldo Editions/Mahler & LeWitt Studios Essay Prize with her proposal for On Refusal. Taking its roots in the space between two walls – The Wailing Wall, a space of prayer and ritual where conscripted teenagers take their oath to the Israeli Defence Force, and the West Bank barrier which dispossesses and divides Palestinian communities – Sarai Kirshner’s On Refusal traces acts of refusal to serve in the Israeli military. Merging the lyric essay form with ethnography and auto-ethnography, the sections composing this essay move across different points in time in which refusal took place, either by individuals or collectives. Each section brings forward a political-personal-historical narrative combined with cultural criticism, interrogating narratives of refusal, their echoes, impasses and ripples throughout the world. In the present moment, when war has unevenly occupied mundane life and the lines between the two have become blurred, On Refusal asks what we lose and what we hold onto when we refuse to partake in the battlefield and its apparatus.
Sarai Kirshner is a writer, artist and researcher. Her work asks how power takes form in landscapes, bodies, and social relations and has been presented and published in various venues in the UK and beyond. Her grandmother’s tongue was German, her mother tongue is Hebrew, and she writes in English and lives in London.
The other shortlisted authors, chosen from 119 entries, were Phoebe Braithwaite for Tesserae, Cassandre Greenberg for My Great Novel, Hana Loftus for Crapes, Abhinav Ullal for Gully Cricket and Claire Wilmot for Show Us the Body.
The Fitzcarraldo Editions/Mahler & LeWitt Studios Essay Prize is an annual competition for unpublished writers. Initially made possible by an Arts Council Grant in 2015, the prize awards £4,000 to the best proposal for a book-length essay (minimum 25,000 words) by a writer resident in the UK & Ireland who has yet to secure a publishing deal. In addition to the £4,000 prize, in the form of an advance against publication with Fitzcarraldo Editions, the winner has the opportunity to spend up to two months in residency at the Mahler & LeWitt Studios in Spoleto, Italy, during the summer of 2025, to work on their book. The book is then published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.
The 2025 Fitzcarraldo Editions/Mahler & LeWitt Studios Essay Prize was judged by Joanna Biggs, Brian Dillon, Sheila Heti, Joanna Kavenna and Jacques Testard. The judges were looking for essays that explore and expand the possibilities of the essay form, with no restrictions on theme or subject matter. The prize aims to find the best emerging essay writers and to give them a chance to develop and showcase their talent. It also provides the winner with their first experience of publishing a book, from the planning, research and writing of it through to the editing, production and publicity stages. Matthew McNaught won the inaugural prize in 2016 for Immanuel (published in 2022), followed by Katy Whitehead in 2017 for Adventures in Synthetic Fun, Joanna Pocock in 2018 with Surrender (published in 2019), Polly Barton in 2019 for Fifty Sounds (published in 2021), Thea Lenarduzzi for Dandelions in 2020 (published in 2022), Heather McCalden forThe Observable Universe in 2021 (published in 2024), Marianne Brooker for Intervals in 2022 (published in 2024), Ghalya Saadawi for Between October and November in 2023 (publication forthcoming), and Lucy Mercer for Afterlife (publication forthcoming).