2026 Juries
Six independent jurors – three to pick the winner of the English prize and three to judge the German one – are selected each year by the prize administrators, Society of Authors in the UK and Kirchner Kommunikation in Germany.
Fiammetta Rocco
Chair Judge, English Jury
Fiammetta Rocco grew up in Kenya and read Arabic at Oxford. For 25 years she was the culture editor of the ‘Economist’, and is now a writer and critic based in London. She is the Emeritus Director of the International Booker Prize and an energetic advocate of reading and story-telling. Fiammetta has been the judge of numerous prizes for fiction and non-fiction. Her writing has won awards on both sides of the Atlantic. She is an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. And her book, ‘The Miraculous Fever Tree’, about malaria and the discovery of quinine, was published in Britain and in America. She and her family live between London and Scotland.
Arabella von Friesen
English Jury
Arabella Friesen studied archaeology at SOAS and has worked as a translator, writer, researcher, editor, reviewer, artist, gardener and cook. She has worked at John Sandoe Books in London since 2012.
Jacky Colliss Harvey
English Jury
Jacky Colliss Harvey studied English at Cambridge University and art history at the Courtauld Institute. She has worked as an editor and publisher in museum publishing, as a life model and as a film extra, and now writes full-time. Her non-fiction titles include the NYT best-seller ‘RED: A History of the Redhead’; and most recently ‘Walking Pepys's London’. Her writing has been praised as 'quirky and deeply perceptive', as 'witty…wide-ranging and thoroughly enjoyable,' and as showing 'an eye for surprising details and a lovely way with description'. Her new book, ‘Thoughtlands: Walking in Writer's Suffolk’, will be published in April 2026.
Millay Hyatt
German Jury
Millay Hyatt (born in 1973 in Dallas, Texas) is a Berlin-based freelance author, translator, and lecturer with a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Southern California. She writes for various publications including ‘Philosophie Magazin’. Her most recent book “Nachtzugtage” (‘Days on the Night Train’) won the 2025 Ilse Schwepcke Prize.
Maria Klöcker
German Jury
Dr. Maria Lucia Klöcker studied law in Freiburg and Geneva. In 2013, she founded the bookstore Weltenleser in Frankfurt, which has been awarded the German Bookstore Prize multiple times.
Martina Wimmer
German Jury
Martina Wimmer, born in 1965, resides in Berlin. She previously traveled the world as a music journalist for ‘ME/Sounds’ and ‘Rolling Stone’, later satisfying her wanderlust as a travel reporter for ‘Geo Saison’, ‘Brigitte’, and ‘FAS’. Since 2008, she has been the cultural editor of the magazine ‘Mare’, for which she also regularly works as an author, most recently in San Francisco and on the Scottish island of Eigg. Additionally, she has published three books with Ullstein Verlag, all of which are no longer in print, and has a few more in the drawer that have so far been waiting in vain for their completion.
The Ilse Schwepcke
Prize Founders
Karl-Burkhard Haus is Ilse’s “little” brother (his words) and is the founder of Schriftform in Frankfurt.
Barbara Schwepcke is Ilse’s daughter, and with her, published travel literature in the collection The Armchair Traveller.
As prize co-founders, Karl-Burkhard and Barbara have no role in judging the prizes. They have been involved in choosing the jurors.
“These prizes in my mother’s name will celebrate the adventurousness, perception and literary skill of women at a time when women’s rights are under attack in many places around the world. It’s never been more important to read women’s experiences as travellers and to affirm women’s right to travel near and far.”
Barbara Schwepcke, prize co-founder