The jury of the Angelus Award decided to honour the memory of Natalya Gorbanevskaya, the first chairperson of the jury, by establishing an award of her name. It is an honourable distinction for one of the seven books qualified for the final of Angelus. The winner is selected by the readers – they can vote, among others, on the Angelus Award website.
The first edition of the Award was organized in 2014. The winners in the years 2014–2019 were:
- Pavol Rankov (2014)
- Lucian Dan Teodorovici (2015)
- Varujan Vosganian (2016)
- Andrea Tompa (2017)
- Maciej Płaza (2018)
- Yuriy Vynnychuk (2019)
Since the 2020 edition, Natalya Gorbanevskaya Readers’ Award is not only an honourable distinction – the winner is invited for a three-months artist-in-residence stay in Wrocław. The winners since 2020 were:
- Sergey Lebedev (2020)
- Kateryna Babkina (2021)
- Jaroslav Rudiš (2022)
- Tamara Duda (2023)