Manya Wilkisnon wins RSL's £15,000 Encore Award for best second novel

We are thrilled to announce that Manya Wilkinson is this year's winner of the RSL Encore award for best second novel, for Lublin!

The win was announced at a special ceremony in London on the 21 May 2025.

This year’s judges were Malika Booker, Fergal Keane and Maura Dooley, who chose Wilkinson’s book as their winner from a shortlist that also featured Molly Aitken, Marina Kemp, Ingrid Persaud and Clare Pollard.

Dooley said: "Manya Wilkinson’s Lublin is a fable in which, in August 1907, three young brush salesmen leave their village, Mezritsh, and head to the market in Lublin in search of riches. To describe it so is to put aside the subtle, clever mesh of history, politics, cultural and social insights that take the reader on a breathless, compelling, steadily more alarming journey. Light-hearted and affectionate at the start of the story, and full of jokes, the mood darkens as the boys try to follow their bewildering map. The city of Lublin grows ever more distant from them. They never reach it. This beautifully written, clever, original novel plays deftly with ideas of history and time. It begins on the Eastern border of today’s Poland, early in a new century, and so throws oblique light on the Yiddish history of forced resettlement and emigration. Yet, it is also a coming-of-age story, a road trip, a series of brilliant absurdist digressions and most of all it holds a mirror to any migrant’s experience caught in the borderland; a life arrested, held back from moving on. It is a novel for our times."

The Encore Award celebrates the best second novel, and was first presented in 1990 and has been administrated by the RSL since 2016. Previous winners include Isabella Hammad, Sally Rooney, Ali Smith, Neil Mukherjee, AL Kennedy, Colm Tóibín, and Caoilinn Hughes.

Lublin was published by And Other Stories in 2024.

Read more about the win here.