The award is financed by the Fund of Cultural Initiatives (2022)[1] Eligible candidates for the award are works of all prose genres, including memoirs, biographies and other documentary prose, written in or translated and screenplays and dramaturgy.
[3] The aim of the prize is to "perpetuate the memory of the outstanding Russian writer Fazil Iskander with Abkhazian roots",[4] Vice-President of the Russian PEN Center, who "revived the epic structure of literature in the 20th century and innovatively saturated the epic with acutely modern and, at the same time, deeply philosophical content".
The board of trustees is composed by:[8] The chairman of the jury, in agreement with the chairman of the organizing committee, selects the number of jury members required for his work (from three to six) from among the members of the Russian PEN Center of famous writers with at least 15 years of experience in literary activity, and distributes among them the work with the works coming to the competition.
The Chairman of the Jury is approved by the writer Yevgeni Anatolyevich Popov.
The award jury consists of five famous people—professional writers, cultural and art workers, academics.
The executive committee of Russian PEN Center approves the candidate for the chairman of the prize jury for a period of three years with a subsequent extension of his powers, if no new chairman of the jury is proposed.
[18] In the nomination "Prose" the winner was Valery Popov (writer) with the story "We are not slaves".
[19][20] In the nomination "Prose" became the laureates and by decision of the jury received two first prizes of equal value—Anatoly Kurchatkin [ru] for the novel Minus 273 degrees Celsius and Vladimir Delba for the book Stardust of My Memories.
[21] Chechen writer Kanta Ibragimov [ru] won the Prose nomination with his novel Stigal.
Beginning as a diary of a cancer patient, the novel becomes an epic work by the end," said Evgeny Popov, chairman of the jury and president of the Russian PEN Center.
[22] the Fazil Iskander Prize winners were: in the Prose category - Eduard Rusakov (Krasnoyarsk) for book The May Dream of Happiness.