Tamara Duda’s novel “Daughter” wins readers’ vote for German Hotlist 2025

The novel “Daughter” by Ukrainian writer, translator, and volunteer Tamara Duda has won the public vote for the German award Hotlist 2025.

Voting ran until August 22, 2025 — during this time, anyone could cast their vote for a book to be included in the list of the best books of the year. In total, thirty titles selected by the jury from 184 submissions were put to a public vote. “Daughter” took first place, receiving 1,758 of the 6,740 valid votes. According to the organizers, this is the highest result in the ten-year history of the voting.

Victoria Amelina’s book “Looking at Women Looking at War” (“Blick auf Frauen den Blick im Krieg”) by Edition fotoTAPETA, which made it to the award’s shortlist along with Tamara Duda’s novel, came in at 11th place.

The results were announced on September 9, 2025. The three books that received the highest number of votes were guaranteed a spot on the list of the year’s top ten books. The other seven titles were chosen by the award’s jury.

The German edition of the book was published in 2025 by Friedrich Mauke Verlag (Weimar) with the title “Donezk Girl”.

The translation was carried out by:

• Annegret Becker — studied linguistics, Slavic studies, Ukrainian studies, and economics in Greifswald and Olomouc. She works as a translator from Ukrainian and as a freelance editor. As a translator, she has worked on the collection “The Future We Wish For” (“Die Zukunft, die wir uns wünschen”), Maria Bilinska’s “Story of the Black Square” (“Geschichte vom schwarzen Quadrat”), and Ganna Gnedkova’s “Ukraine mon amour: Voices of a Free Nation” (“Ukraine mon amour: Stimmen einer freien Nation”).
• Lukas Joura — studied Slavic and social sciences as well as European studies at the graduate level. He currently works as a research assistant in Slavic Studies/Eastern European History at the European University Viadrina, the University of Potsdam, and Humboldt University of Berlin, and also as a translator of academic and literary texts from Ukrainian. He co-translated Valerian Pidmohylnyi’s “The City” (“Die Stadt”) and others.
• Oleksandr Kratochvil — studied Slavic studies, Eastern European history, and German studies. He is a scholar and a translator from Ukrainian and Czech and is considered one of the most important promoters of Ukrainian literature in the German-speaking world. He has translated numerous works by Oksana Zabuzhko, Yuriy Vynnychuk, Oleksandr Irvanets, and Sofia Andrukhovych.

In Ukrainian, the novel “Daughter” was first published in 2019 by Bilka Publishing House. The events of the book unfold in 2014, against the backdrop of the beginning of the war in eastern Ukraine — telling the story of the invasion through the eyes of a volunteer.

Read our review: Women at war: Acclaimed Ukrainian novel bridges fragility, mysticism and resilience 

Copy editing: Joy Tataryn