After receiving hundreds of entries, six titles made it to the shortlist of the 2025 Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards. Three titles in Photography and three in the Moving Image category compete for the prestigious UK award and the £10,000 shared prize fund. The shortlisted works cover topics ranging from non-binary identity to the revivial of cinema.
The Kraszna-Krausz Foundation behind the award is named after the Hungarian-born publisher Andor Kraszna-Krausz, founder of Focal Press, a UK publishing house renovned for their specialised books on photography. Continuing his legacy the award now marks its 40th anniversary and celebrates books that make an outstanding contribution to art, history, research, criticism, science or conservation of photography or the moving image.
From the Kraszna-Krusz Foundation, 4 June, 2025
The Three Shortlisted Titles for the 2025 Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award
- Outside the Binary by Linda Bournane Engelberth (Journal) – A series of portraits uniting people from across the world who identify outside the gender binary. For some, this can mean having both a male and female identity; something in between or shifting; or being androgynous or neutral and not defined through gender at all. An ongoing project, Engelberth hopes to photograph in Russia, Latin America and more countries in Africa with the aim being to portray people in as many countries as possible, to normalize and show people that this way of feeling gender exists naturally in every country.
- Tee A. Corinne: A forest fire between us by Charlotte Flint (Ed.) (MACK) – An ambitious publication edited by Flint uncovering Tee A. Corrine’s radical photographic practice and offering a new perspective on its intersections with her work as a lesbian sex activist. Delving into an extensive array of archival material, featuring unseen photographs, contact sheets, ephemera, and an extensive chronology, it is a call to action that shows the ways in which photography, activism, and community can come together to create a powerful new visual language around desire.
- The Dog Sat Where We Parted by Mahmoud Khattab (Self-published) – A deeply personal project, Khattab captures the vulnerability and fragility of military life in Egypt. Shot during his enforced year of Egyptian national service as an army doctor in 2017, the title refers to Antar, a stray dog with whom Khattab formed a close bond over five-mile walks across the desert. The work responds to Khattab’s feelings of intense loneliness as a soldier.
The Three Shortlisted Titles for the 2025 Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award
Women’s Transborder Cinema: Authorship, Stardom, and Filmic Labor in South Asia by Esha Niyogi De (University of Illinois Press) – De uses film tropes to examine the ways women directors and film entrepreneurs claim creative control within the contexts of anti-colonial nationalism and global capitalism. The region’s cinemas have become staging grounds for postcolonialism, with colonial and local hierarchies merged into new imperial formations. De’s analysis shows how the gendered intersections of inequity and opportunity shape women’s fiction filmmaking while illuminating the impact of state and market formations on the process.
Screen Deep: How film and TV can solve racism and save the world by Ellen E. Jones (Faber) – A book about the immense potential of screen storytelling to defeat an evil both historic and urgently topical: racism. Jones combines her personal experience as a mixed-race woman with her professional expertise as a film and TV journalist of twenty years standing, and goes beyond the many film books and anti-racist manuals by demonstrating the connection between these two aspects of modern life.
Seeing Further by Esther Kinsky (translated by Caroline Schmidt) (Fitzcarraldo Editions) – Kinsky, one of Germany’s most revered contemporary writers, documents the colossal task on which she embarks in reviving a decaying cinema, ‘mozi’, in a small Hungarian town near the Romanian border. Kinsky describes how she was compelled to act, driven by the irresistible magic of the cinema, a site rooted in ritual that is steadily disappearing. This is a powerfully eloquent declaration of love to the cinema and the collective experience of watching, beautifully translated by Schmidt.
The final winners will be announced at the end of June 2025, while next year’s call for entries will be issued in November 2025.
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