Renowned writer Szczepan Twardoch has won the 2026 Nike Literary Award for his novel “Null.” Readers also voted for the book.
The book is also available in Belarusian. In 2025, the Yanushkevich publishing house published “Null” in a translation by Katsyaryna Matsiyeuskaya.
The title “Null” refers to the front line. The novel is set in Ukraine. In writing it, the author drew on his own experience of being in Ukraine and stories he heard from soldiers, although the characters and events are fictional. Twardoch emphasized that he wanted to portray the war as close to reality as possible — without romanticizing the front and creating a simple division between heroes and villains.
Written harshly, vividly and concisely, as only Szczepan Twardoch knows how to write.
The novel emerged from an interplay of circumstances. In other interviews, the writer explained that war had always been his subject. And because this war turned out to be so close, it began to draw him in “with the force of a magnet.” Twardoch started traveling to Ukraine and writing texts. His German publisher then commissioned him to write a nonfiction book about the war. However, nothing worked out. “At the moment of my greatest despair, I began writing a novel because I remembered that I was a novelist,” Twardoch recalls.
“We needed this story,” wrote Witold Bereś, chair of the award jury, in his tribute. “Strong, painfully sincere prose without a single drop of cheap pathos.”