Your Presence Is Mandatory by Sasha Vasilyuk (Bloomsbury Publishing), a first novel, has won the $100,000 2025 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, which, in association with the National Library of Israel, honors "exceptional work of emerging writers in the examination and transmission of Jewish life, culture and identity."
Organizers said: "Inspired by her own family history, Vasilyuk's novel explores the hidden costs of war, the legacy of silence and the complex moral terrain of Jewish life in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Ukraine."