Sasha Kurmaz has won the 2026 Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award for Red Horse, the prize's administrators have announced.

The Kraszna-Krausz Award, founded in 1985 through the bequest of the Hungarian-born publisher Andor Kraszna-Krausz, remains one of the most distinguished honours in the photobook field. It recognises books that demonstrate an exceptional marriage of image and text, and past outcomes have shaped how photographers, editors and publishers think about the book as a form rather than a mere container for pictures.

Kurmaz, who works in Kyiv, has built a practice rooted in the social fabric of Ukraine: youth subcultures, marginalised communities and the textures of a country living through war. His photographs sit somewhere between documentary urgency and intimate portraiture, made with an instinct for the flawed, the tender and the unresolved. Red Horse continues in that register.

Details of the 2026 judging panel's citation, the shortlist that accompanied the win, and the prize money attached to the award have accompanied the announcement through the London-based photography publication 1854 Photography, which first reported the outcome.

The award joins a growing list of institutional recognitions for Ukrainian photographic practice since 2022, as museums, publishers and festivals across Europe have moved to document and preserve work produced under conditions of war. Kurmaz's monograph now enters that institutional record — a book recognised not only for its images but for what it preserves of a place and a moment.

The 2026 Kraszna-Krausz outcome suggests the photobook's centrality to contemporary photography remains undiminished; further announcements from the foundation on this year's moving-image category and associated exhibitions are expected in the coming months.