2026 Book Awards

“‘The Fold’ offers a compelling reassessment of photography’s colonial entanglements and its fixation on “the other.” Drawing on the unusual archive of Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault (1872–1934) and his photographs of veiled subjects, Hoda Afshar stages a critical intervention through cropping, fragmentation, and repetition. The cumulative effect is dizzying and deliberately disorientating. In reworking these images, Afshar destabilizes notions of the exotic, confronting the persistent complexities surrounding women, visibility and concealment.”
Fiona Rogers

“Following her father in his last week as a beauty-product salesman, Janet Delaney’s book is a gentle, humorous and ultimately moving portrait of a man and his work. Including transcripts of conversations with and between her father and his customers, plus moving texts by Delaney and her mother, the book shows the value of an easily overlooked community.”
Diane Smyth

“‘Red Horse’ is a personal testimony of a contemporary war, a visceral album of living in the realities of modern conflict, specifically the war in Ukraine. Sasha Kurmaz creates multiple pages that embody the precariousness of existence, each presenting the raw brutality of conflict. The book serves as an archive of his everyday life and the lives of those around him, its pages constantly being reshaped by the war.”
Jermaine Francis

“The book explores the idea of the unfixed nature of photography and, in this context, the documentary genre. It expands the production of meaning, providing a multiplicity of considerations, an attack on reductionism. Additionally, what makes this book special is that it functions as a specific object, where its materiality is directly interconnected with the reading of the photographs. For example, the design creates a fragility in the structure of the book and works into the concept of instability. Details are revealed, and relationships are disrupted and reconsidered.”
Jermaine Francis

“A playful yet provocative critique of the legacies and circulation of African art, ‘A Reprise’ functions as a reparative gesture through staged photography and Dada-inspired collage. Drawing on Walker Evans’ 1935 commission by the Museum of Modern Art to document objects from the exhibition African Negro Art, David Alekhuogie remixes these black-and-white images with vibrant African textiles, offering an alternative perspective while raising vital questions about authenticity and artistic authorship.”
Fiona Rogers

“Featuring tightly-cropped frames of often disorientating scenes, ‘Sound the Sirens’ is a compelling insight into the reality of climate change. Eschewing straight narratives that retain our sense of control or even distance, it lays out our messy impending future with a sense of the chaos it will evoke.”
Diane Smyth

“Arthur Tress’ beautiful, tender and surreal photographs document the cruising scene in the artificially created woodland area known as The Ramble, a queer space that existed in 1960s Central Park. This book is about the act of looking; men looking at men cruising; Arthur Tress looking at them through his lens; and now us, as participants in this process decades later. Unlike other projects of this genre, which can sometimes be voyeuristic and anthropological, the participatory process created in this book is what helps take these images into a different space.”
Jermaine Francis

“A simple, witty idea, ‘MAN’ deftly uses the format of the photobook to comment on the central position men have quite literally occupied. Allowing individuals’ own hubris to work against them, and losing them in the gutter, the concept is accelerated to the max by sheer number – at well over 700 pages, this small but chunky book shows the men’s behaviour to be endemic and sociological if often unconscious. The book also does something quietly radical, refocusing attention on the women previously held in peripheral vision.”
Diane Smyth

“‘The Weight of the Word’ is quietly chilling. Combining archival medical images, official portraits, and shots of talks and events, it suggests the role photography played in legitimising and promoting nine Nazi doctors and their dehumanising views. The modest production of the book, which has soft covers and minimal borders, suggests a compelling sense of gravity and economy – this is information that needs to be shared, not a luxurious overproduced tome destined to die on the coffee table.”
Diane Smyth

“This beautiful book weaves a curious mix of 1950s vintage nostalgia with the faded glamour of 1990s Hollywood. Drawing deeply on the history and language of cinema, ‘Swan Moon’s Swan Moon’ deftly combines portraiture and performance in luminous black and white, each image a still from an imagined film in which Moon and her friends occupy central characters. The work offers a distinctive perspective on youth culture and the enduring concept of the American dream.”
Fiona Rogers

“This book is a gift, one of real importance and significance. It destroys the preconceptions of Black presence only after Windrush, presenting a collection of Black portraiture from the Victorian period. Making the invisible visible, images of Black people that have been laying silent in the archives. Accompanied by Renée Mussai’s rich biographical interventions, these portraits are finally given voices, countering the anonymous existence they previously held.”
Jermaine Francis

“Raymond Thompson Jr. presents a sensitive, intimate love letter to his ancestors. It is part exploration into hauntology, part conversation with the past, philosophical musings, and a declaration of defiance. Thompson tells the little known story of the Maroons who escaped slavery in the US, and, instead of travelling to the North, stayed in the South, building communities in the wild, inaccessible swamps on the periphery of plantations. What made this book special was the dialogue from the present to the past. The photographs and historical texts, documents and newspaper articles become portals – entry points to conceptually travel through time.”
Jermaine Francis

“This book connects initially as a pleasurable reading experience, but in its incorporation of the essayistic and personal, alongside the critical and analytical, ‘Out There in the Dark’ also gracefully affirms the validity of an emotional, embodied response to cinema. As promised, Coldiron lit up her fire-like projector and, as readers, we were both illuminated and warmed by its glow.”
Ellen E Jones

“The judges valued the depth of engagement with a worthy topic, the richness of the collated oral histories and film festival ephemera, and the fact that this book is itself an act of radical archiving; helping to further June Givanni’s life’s work by preserving the vitality of Pan-African Cinema for future generations to come.”
Ellen E Jones

“A fascinating case study that explores a multiracial effort to collaborate in the pursuit of shared creative rebellion for social change. An inspiring example that could be transplanted to another place and time for the universal goal of independent, socially engaged media.”
Dr Agata Lulkowska

“A beautifully designed MUBI Editions book that explores typography in cinema. Its strength lies in directing our attention to seemingly trivial and previously unexplored aspects of film materiality, so nicely mirrored in the experimental book design and its materiality.”
Dr Agata Lulkowska

“A really timely book that explores social media activism and the way it captures our attention and appeals to our emotions to initiate change. A thorough and insightful analysis and historical overview of a dynamically changing media landscape.”
Dr Agata Lulkowska

“This comprehensive collection celebrates women screenwriters and the stories of communities they tell. A global and inclusive panorama is brought into focus. Established and lauded filmmakers – from Ida Lupino to Céline Sciamma and Greta Gerwig – brush shoulders with lesser-discussed women screenwriters from all around the world. From movies to documentaries to rap to animation, large and small-screens likewise coexist happily between the covers. What stands out most of all is the impressive size and scale of the project, brought together by film practitioners Ferrell and Welch.”
Professor David Martin-Jones

“This fascinating voyage around the outer galaxies of the 1920s and 1930s Hollywood star system effectively debunks the notion that to be a movie star is to be glamorous or aspirational. With an irreverent style that draws on fan magazines as well as film performances ‘Hollywood’s Others’ introduces us to a different kind of star-fan relationship, one which simultaneously expands and contracts the audience’s empathies.”
Ellen E Jones

“Masculinity and its construction continues to be a preoccupation across society, ensuring this study of the components of male sex appeal on screen is hotter than ever! (In the strictly academic sense of ‘timely’ and ‘necessary’, that is. Ahem.) Gallagher’s lively work gains depth through its engagement with intersecting racial and national identities, looking at stars from Idris Elba to Pedro Pascal and Simu Liu, and how exoticism, racism and other examples of structural inequality inform human desire.”
Ellen E Jones

“A most accessible and intriguing approach to a fascinating topic! This book brings alive the presence of animism in East Asian films well-known to Western audiences: from Hou Hsiao-hsien, Kore-eda Hirokazu, Wong Kar-wai and Kawase Naomi. It unlocks new layers of meaning by clearly explaining the role of onscreen intermediaries (shamanic figures) who negotiate between human and non-human worlds. The power of this book is that, once this is seen, it is impossible to unsee it. A compelling work full of sophisticated, clear and elegant analysis which provides new ecological insights from East Asian movies.”
Professor David Martin-Jones

“This fascinating exploration of exilic Chilean cinematic resistance to authoritarianism provides hope for turbulent times…Not only a counter-cinema, cinema of resistance, an alternative archive, it is all of these things, but also an expression of solidarity illuminating new ways of decentring definitions of world cinema. The origins of our current neoliberal globalized worlds are often traced to Chile in the 1970s. This book explores how filmmakers reacted to this moment, realizing how coming together to make and watch films keeps alive our connections to each other.”
Professor David Martin-Jones