The Sharon Stephens Book Prize is awarded biennially for a junior scholar’s first book. In recognition of Sharon Stephens’ commitment to scholarship of the highest intellectual caliber informed by deep care for the world, we are happy to announce Intimate Strangers: Commercial Surrogacy in Russia and Ukraine and the Making of Truth by Veronika Siegl as the winner of the 2025 book prize. The honorable mention is awarded to Money, Value, and the State: Sovereignty and Citizenship in East Africa by Kevin P. Donovan.
Winner 
Intimate Strangers by Veronika Siegl is a fascinating ethnography of transnational surrogacy in Russia and Ukraine. Developing the notion of ethical labor, Siegl shows how intended parents and surrogates contribute to the moral economy of commercial surrogacy in unexpected and at times strategic ways. The book offers deep insights into the international infrastructure of transnational surrogacy, connecting distant clientele to commercial fairs, agencies, surrogates, and well-appointed birth clinics across multiple locations. Central to the surrogacy process is the delicate management of bodies, intentions, and emotions, which cover up the motivations of class and compensation. Siegl’s clear and composed writing delivers us straight into the complex emotional world of surrogacy, where neoliberal ideas and individual notions about freedom and choice run up against deep-seated cultural understandings of love, belonging, and responsibility.
Honorable Mention 
Kevin P. Donovan’s Money, Value, and the State is an historical examination of the struggles over decolonization and financial governance in 1970s East Africa. Through skillful archival analysis combining several official archives in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and the UK, Donovan tracks how ordinary people contested colonial regimes of value even after independence. The book examines the formal and informal experiments of East African financial sovereignty in their full ethnographic detail, delivering a much needed contribution to our understanding of the 1970s as an important and overlooked decade.
