Eurozine editors name 2025’s top cultural journal articles

As 2025 closes, Eurozine editors published a top-10 list of the year’s most compelling articles from European cultural journals, casting the selection as a partial snapshot of a tense, multilingual public sphere—where translation, memory, democracy, and resist

As 2025 draws to an end. Eurozine’s editors frame the year’s best reading as more than a set of recommendations. It’s a reflection of the debates shaping the European public sphere at the end of the first quartile of the 21st century—and a reminder that the cultural journals sector across Europe still matters precisely when the world feels loud. fractured. and in motion.

They call the list “necessarily impressionistic. ” and partial. even as they argue it does “truthfully” represent the quality and diversity of independent cultural journals. The editors also leave readers with a challenge: crises may correlate with intense literary activity. but not always with intellectual clarity. Their selection, they say, leans toward “clearsightedness”—but they insist the reader must judge.

The through-line is a Europe where borders—between languages. between reality and non-reality. between the human and the non-human—are being denied. Marci Shore. writing for Eurozine. opens the list by insisting translation can act like an antidote: against the nihilism of borderlessness. against the flattening of difference. and against the idea that encounter can be dismissed.

Miriam Rasch. from De Nederlandse Boekengids. turns to a different kind of closing-in: the glorification of storytelling that can feel like an obligation. She notes philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s critique of “story-selling. ” and asks whether digitally packaged stories shrink the way we perceive lives that are often rambling. fragmentary. and—too frequently—only fully understood in retrospect.

For Hazem Jamjoum at Vikerkaar, the question is what happens when hope is inherited without a path. For younger Palestinians. many of them diasporic. the heroics of the past offer no substitute for the absence of an organized liberation movement. Abandoning myths of statehood through negotiated settlement, he writes that they are defining the goals of liberation and return anew.

In Merkur. Omri Boehm. Teresa Koloma Beck. and Carola Lentz push back against a far-right demand for Germany to “move on” from historical guilt. Their point is that politics of memory and its practices may shift—from contrition toward “responsible forgetting”—but there can be no end date to remembering in ways that can include diverse members of society.

Lea Ypi, writing from the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), lands the debate on democracy itself. What happens. she asks. when governments court the rich and highly skilled by offering citizenship as privilege while turning those in need away?. Her article ties that imbalance to this year’s Speech to Europe. where the concept of “good” and “bad” migrants is placed under pressure.

Then Chowra Makaremi. also for Eurozine. asks how bodies and lives are changed by repeated cruelty—cruelty that is witnessed as routine. forcing endurance on women. the poor. and others excluded from citizenship. “as in Gaza.” Her alternative is not denial of suffering. It is resistance located in the “gestation of fragmented. suspended lives. ” in the martyred dead. and in movements like “Woman. Life Freedom.”.

M. Špoljar at VoxFeminae approaches erasure from a legal and human angle at the same time. The UK Supreme Court, the article notes, has acted to erase trans people to satisfy retrograde opinions on gender diversity. Against that. the profile of American activist Lou Sullivan—featured by Vox Feminae—becomes a reminder that being born a “biological woman” is not a fixed definition.

Agri Ismaïl, from Glänta, brings the reader to technology, but not as abstraction. The technological link between the rifle and the film camera. the medial links between the Gulf War and Star Wars. and the colonial history of bombs are presented as fragments that. when pieced together. form an image of Kurdistan as a testing ground for military technology unleashed without responsibility for its consequences.

Hamit Bozarslan’s piece for Esprit places another kind of responsibility in historical time. The outbreak of the Lebanese civil war fifty years ago. he writes. inaugurated an era of nation-state collapse in the Arab world. And in failing to mediate. the international community carries responsibility for the sense of impotence felt in societies where violence dominated everything.

Miha Kovač, at Razpotja and Wespennest, closes the list with a warning that reads like a defense. Growing reluctance to engage with books, he writes, endangers democracy and science. Deep reading. he argues. strengthens the human capacity for abstract and analytical thinking. protecting us from the corrosive effects of bias. prejudice. and conspiracy theories.

Even as the editors say the selection is partial. the shape of the year becomes harder to miss: language and encounter. memory and forgetting. who belongs in the idea of democracy. and how cruelty and violence ripple into culture and law. The insistence on translation. the fight over what should be remembered. the refusal to grant citizenship as a reward. and the defense of reading all sit in the same tense room.

Eurozine closes with gratitude to readers for following in 2025. and with a promise of “the latest content from independent cultural journals across Europe and beyond in 2026.” Until then. the editors wish “happy holidays”—but they don’t let the year end softly. The books. the archives. the arguments. and the profiles they picked are still pushing against denial. still insisting that cultural identity is not a finished product. It is something contested, translated, and fought for.

Eurozine 2025 cultural journals literature translation memory democracy Gaza Woman Life Freedom trans rights Kurdistan Lebanese civil war deep reading