27 October 2026

TANDEM Fellow Yavuz Ekinci (Turkey) and TANDEM alumna Lavinia Braniște (Romania) have been shortlisted for the 2026 Writing as Resistance Award, jointly presented by the prestigious PEN International and Fondazione Feltrinelli, and for Prix Médicis Étranger, respectively, the foreign novel strand of the famed Prix Médicis.

Along with seven other international authors (including a group of four) who, in their work, demonstrate courage in championing civic engagement and solidarity in defending freedom and human rights against oppression, Yavuz Ekinci was nominated for having “faced prosecution and censorship for writing about difficult and contested themes, including Kurdish identity, political persecution and displacement.”

Similarly, Lavinia Braniște shares the shortlist for Prix Médicis Étranger, which went in the past to writers as prominent as Milan Kundera, Julio Cortázar or Umberto Eco, with eight other authors. Her nomination was made for her novel Camping (translated into French by Sylvain Audet-Găinar), which is the distressing but true-to-life story of a Romanian émigré to Spain for whom “home” has become a blurred notion that stirs regrets, memories, mixed emotions and bitter-sweet reflections.

The Prix Médicis for best foreign novelist will be announced on 2 November, while the winner of the Writing as Resistance Award will be made known at the BookCity Milan 2026 (23-29 November).

As part of the TANDEM Programme run by NEC, Lavinia Braniște worked with Armenian translator Arsen Arzumanyan on her novel Interior zero in Jan-Feb 2026, while Yavuz Ekinci is currently working with Ukrainian translator Natalia Talalai on his novel Aziz.