Bulgarian National Radio receives two PRIX EUROPA 2026 nominations

Bulgarian National Radio has received two nominations for PRIX EUROPA 2026, one of Europe’s leading awards for media productions. The festival opens on October 11 at Berlin’s Haus des Rundfunks, bringing together audio, video and digital productions from across Europe. A total of 600 entries from European public and private media organisations were submitted for this year’s competition.

BNR’s first nomination is in the Audio Fiction category for the radio play Messiah. A Liturgical Poem. Produced by the Radio Theatre of BNR’s Hristo Botev Programme, it was first broadcast in late November 2025 and is based on a play by contemporary Bulgarian poet Ani Ilkov.

It is the only work Ilkov conceived for the stage and had never been performed before BNR’s production. Moving beyond conventional genre boundaries, the play combines mystery and comedy, the political and the erotic, the poetic and the everyday. Its description as a “liturgical poem” harks back to the period of the Bulgarian National Revival, while the text engages with the literary legacy of authors including Samuel Beckett, Daniil Kharms and Konstantin Pavlov.

Although not originally written for radio, the work was adapted for the medium under the direction of Hristo Simeonov-Rindo, with sound design by Gergana Dramalieva and sound engineering by Mihail Mihaylov. The cast includes Valentin Ganev and Veselin Rankov.

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BNR’s second nomination is in the Digital Media category for the videocast Shadows from the Balkans. Produced jointly with the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and Bulgaria’s General Directorate National Police, the project focuses on telephone fraud and the ways in which such schemes are evolving alongside new channels of communication.

Shadows from the Balkans uses a distinctive comic-book-style visual animation. The production team also incorporated artificial intelligence tools, while retaining editorial oversight and human control over the final structure and content.

The two nominations span very different forms of public-service media – traditional radio drama and an experimental digital format combining animation and AI.

The winners will be announced at the PRIX EUROPA Awards Ceremony in Berlin on October 16, during the 40th edition of the festival.

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Editor: Elena Karkalanova