Cyprus offers publishers up to €7,000 a book for works on the island’s culture and history

Publishers in Cyprus will soon be able to seek public money for books on the island's culture and history. The Deputy Ministry of Culture announced its Publication Grants Scheme for the Culture of Cyprus 2026 on 23 October. Run by its Department of Contemporary Culture, the scheme pays up to 70% of a book's eligible costs, to a ceiling of €7,000 per title, from a yearly budget of €80,000.

Only publishers may apply: publishing businesses constituted as private-law legal persons and registered with the Registrar of Companies in the Republic. An author comes in through a publisher, and the application must include a preliminary contract between the two setting out the cost of the edition, the author's royalties and the author's copies. Each publisher can receive a grant for one title a year.

The terms list eleven fields. Archaeology is not named among them. The closest are the history of Cyprus and architecture, and one of the scheme's stated aims is the documentation and interpretation of the island's cultural and historical heritage, material as well as intangible, which takes in its ancient past. The other fields are folklore and intangible heritage, literature, theatre, music, dance, cinema, the visual arts, digital culture and cultural documentation, and biographies of figures in Cypriot culture.

Eligible works are original research, documented scholarly studies, revised and enlarged editions with a scholarly approach, and significant books that have gone out of print, even without new material, so older works on Cyprus can be reissued. Plain reprints, photomechanical reproductions and promotional works are excluded. The grant can pay for scholarly and copy editing, layout and design, printing, image rights and promotion, and promotion must take at least 10% of it. A five-member committee, two of them academics, scores each proposal out of 100, with 45 points for the quality and significance of the work. The complete manuscript, in final or near-final form, goes in with the application. Up to 80% of the grant is paid in advance on approval; the rest follows publication, once the publisher has delivered ten copies and an audited account of costs.

Applications go online only, through the Grants4Arts platform, from 9 November 2026. The deadline is 30 November 2026 at 14:00. The terms of the scheme (in Greek) list the documents required.