Ivan V. Lalić's The Taste of Lightning shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize 2026
Francis R. Jones's translation from Serbian of the late Ivan V. Lalić's The Taste of Lightning: Selected Poems, published by Bloodaxe Books in November 2025, is on the shortlist for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize 2026. The eight-strong shortlist, selected from a longlist of sixteen books, was announced on 21 May 2026.
The Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize is for book-length literary translations into English from any living European language. The judges take into consideration the quality of the translation as well as the importance of the original work and the value of its being put into English. The prize aims to honour the craft of translation, and to recognise its cultural importance. It was founded by Lord Weidenfeld and is supported by New College, The Queen’s College, and St Anne’s College, Oxford.
The winner of the £2,000 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize 2026 will be announced on Oxford Translation Day, Saturday 13 June 2026, at St Anne’s College, Oxford. Oxford Translation Day will feature talks, seminars, and workshops, and will give shortlisted translators the opportunity to read from and discuss their work.
Reserve a free ticket to the prize ceremony here.
Details of the full shortlist can be found here.
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For digital or print review copies of The Taste of Lightning: Selected Poems, please email Christine Macgregor: publicity@bloodaxebooks.com.
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The Taste of Lightning: Selected Poems brings together poems by Ivan V. Lalić (1931-96), one of 20th-century Yugoslavia’s most crucial poets. Lalić’s poetry is alive with seeing and feeling the world – a world of sun and wind, water and fire. He is also a poet of love – a love for his wife Branka that ‘matures like wine’ over the decades. From adolescence, through young adulthood, to the onset of old age, where ‘We are twin foci of the same ellipse… Which links two other foci: death and love.’
The Taste of Lightning introduces new readers to this grand master of European poetry, whose other books in English are now out of print. And for those who know Lalić’s poetic world, it combines revisions of previously published translations with poems not seen before in English.
The Taste of Lightning traces the whole arc of Lalić’s poetic career. From the directness of his early work in the 1950s, which emerged from the trauma of a wartime boyhood. Through the rich imagery and startlingly apt similes of his mature verse. But it also charts another voice, thoughtful and meditative, that gradually grows more prominent. This voice finally reflects, just before Lalić’s death in 1996, on what God’s purpose might be in a world wounded by personal and national tragedy: ‘may he forgive my fear / That he created me, as the book says, in his own image’.
Francis R. Jones, the book’s editor and translator, knew Lalić well, and has worked with his poems for almost five decades. Of Jones’s 15 translation prizes to date, five were awarded for his versions of Lalić’s poetry. His translation of the late Ivan V. Lalić's The Taste of Lightning: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2025), is shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize 2026.
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‘Lalić was the pre-eminent Serbo-Croat language poet of his generation, and one of the most significant figures of modern Balkan literature. Francis R Jones's searing translations make up the first English language publication of his selected works: a long-overdue act of recovery. […] The Danube flows through Lalić's work, uniting Croatian, Serbian, Romanian, Italian, Greek, Jewish, and Ottoman identities in a vision which refuses nationalist division. Described variously as a Serbian, Yugoslav or European poet […] Lalić was in truth a major international poet.’ – Orla Polten, New Internationalist
‘Lalić’s poetry, sensual, accessible, vivid and memorable, has gained widespread admiration and recognition. […] Lalić’s lyrical poetry is imbued with Mediterranean landscapes and the play of sunlight on water. […] The translator, Francis R Jones, knew Lalić well and their close collaboration on these translations, (Lalić was a translator too), is immediately self-evident. Highly recommended.’ – Neil Leadbeater, Write Out Loud
'The translator, Francis R. Jones, knew Lalić well and that close relationship with the poet must have contributed to producing these brilliant translations, skilfully replicating or finding equivalents for the originals’ shifts between forms, metre, alliteration, tone and style.' – Anna Blasiak, Riveting Reviews, European Literature Network
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Joint online launch for Tomas Venclova, Pia Tafdrup and Ivan V. Lalić, Thursday 20 November 2025
Bloodaxe hosted this online launch event for new titles by Tomas Venclova, Pia Tafdrup and Ivan V. Lalić (1931-1996) on Thursday 20 November 2025. Reading from and discussing the books with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley, were Tomas Venclova in Vilnius with translator Ellen Hinsey in Berlin, Pia Tafdrup in Copenhagen, and Ivan V. Lalić's translator Francis R. Jones (in Northumberland) with Professor Svetlana Šeatović (in Belgrade).
This international Bloodaxe launch event was streamed on YouTube Live and is now available to watch below, and on this YouTube page: https://youtube.com/live/OTRTqP2CCSc
[22 May 2026]
