Nino Haratischwili announced as 2026 Writer in Residence

The UCL European Institute is delighted to announce the award-winning German-Georgian writer as the UCL 2026 European Literary Map of London Writer in Residence.

The UCL residency is provided in partnership with the Goethe-Institut London, the EU National Institutes for Culture (EUNIC) London and the European Literature Network, and made possible through the generous support of the UCL Grand Challenges programme.

For the duration of her four-week stay in London, Nino will spend time writing and engaging with UCL staff and students, speaking at the European Writers’ Festival at the British Library, and taking part in related events.

The residency is offered as part of UCL’s European Literary Map of London (ELML), an interactive and ever-growing online map featuring texts about London, written in currently 29 different languages by European writers who have over the decades both transformed and been transformed by London.

Born in Tbilisi in 1983, Nino Haratischwili is a novelist, playwright, and theatre director. She writes in German and is among the most acclaimed and widely-read authors of contemporary German literature. She lives in Berlin.

Her third novel, The Eighth Life (for Brilka) (German/FVA 2014; Scribe UK/English 2019), was translated into thirty languages and became an international bestseller. It won the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, the Anna Seghers Prize, and the Bertolt Brecht Prize, and was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2020. 

The Lack of Light (German/FVA 2022; English/HarperVia 2025) is her most recent novel. Set in post-Soviet Georgia, it was praised by the Financial Times as ‘an epic edge-of-the-seat tale of friendship and political chaos.’

The European Literary Map of London Writer in Residency is an annual residency offered to one selected writer for four weeks. The first writer in residence 2024 was the Bulgarian writer Joanna Elmy, followed in 2025 by Irish writer Ciara Broderick.