Ukrainian singer, composer and producer GANNA won the 2026 Anchor Award at Hamburg’s Reeperbahn Festival on September 18th, emerging from a six-act field after a live performance that moved members of the international jury to tears.
The Berlin-based artist, whose full name is Ganna Gryniva, received the festival’s emerging-artist prize after jurors Domiziana, Jerry Heil, Oklou and Sega Bodega watched the nominees perform during the festival. NDR’s festival report describes stage presence, lasting impression and the physical response generated in the audience as central judging criteria.
GANNA’s victory is particularly well matched to this year’s Reeperbahn Festival. Ukraine is the event’s first official Guest Country of Honour, while Gryniva has spent more than a decade researching Ukrainian traditional music and transforming it through jazz, electronics, improvisation and live looping.
An Emotional Set Wins the Anchor
The Anchor is built around what happens onstage. Rather than selecting a winner from recordings alone, the jury attends the nominated artists’ festival performances before making its decision.
GANNA played the Mojo Club on September 17th, with the venue schedule placing her between Berlin collective Sonic Interventions and Australian electro artist Big Wett. The wider six-act field also included Dov’è Liana, Just For Fun and British singer-songwriter and producer Nectar Woode.
By the time the award ceremony reached Hamburg’s St. Pauli Theater the following evening, the jury had already made its choice. NDR reported that parts of the panel had cried during GANNA’s performance before Jerry Heil announced her as the winner.
Heil connected the decision directly to Gryniva’s relationship with Ukrainian musical tradition, thanking her during the ceremony for maintaining and collecting old traditions. GANNA responded by speaking about her pride in Ukraine and its culture. The artist also admitted she had prepared no acceptance speech because, as dpa’s account recorded, she was not accustomed to winning things.
The award brings practical support alongside the trophy. GANNA receives €5,000, a €20,000 technology voucher and use of a tour bus for one month.
GANNA Treats Tradition as Living Material
Calling GANNA a folk singer only describes the starting point.
Her music sits at the intersection of Ukrainian folklore, electronica, jazz and improvisation. Rather than placing traditional melodies inside otherwise conventional contemporary productions, Gryniva allows the source material itself to become something that can be stretched, layered and reorganized.
Her current artist biography from F-Cat Productions traces that approach to more than a decade of field research, travel and encounters with village singers across Ukraine. Traditional songs and oral practices collected through that work become raw material for contemporary performances rather than artifacts reproduced unchanged.
Her solo setup makes the transformation especially audible. Voice, loops, effects, samples, traditional instruments and Guitaret synth can all become part of a performance assembled in real time. A melody may begin alone, return as a loop and then accumulate additional voices or electronic textures around itself.
That makes the GANNA Anchor Award Reeperbahn Festival 2026 result more interesting than a conventional newcomer win. The jury rewarded an artist whose relationship with tradition depends partly on refusing to freeze it.
UTOPIA Pushed the Sound Further
GANNA arrived in Hamburg with a recent album that had already expanded the possibilities around that approach.
Released in 2025 through BERTHOLD Records, UTOPIA followed her 2023 album KUPALA and continued moving Ukrainian source material into a broader contemporary setting. The album was co-produced with Tomáš Kašpar and includes musicians working across jazz, traditional and experimental music, according to her current discography.
The important distinction is that GANNA’s music does not behave like a neat equation where Ukrainian folk plus jazz plus electronics produces a predictable hybrid. Those elements can occupy different roles from song to song and even within the same performance.
Jazz gives her room for improvisation. Electronics allow a voice or instrumental fragment to be repeated and reshaped. Traditional melodies supply material carrying a history that predates the contemporary arrangement around them.
That flexibility also gives Gryniva’s voice several jobs. It can deliver a melody directly, operate as an improvising instrument or multiply through looping until a solo performance begins behaving more like an ensemble.
Reeperbahn Makes the Stage the Test
The Anchor Award fits naturally inside a festival built around discovering artists in rooms rather than through playlists alone.
Reeperbahn Festival runs from September 16th through September 19th across Hamburg’s St. Pauli district, combining hundreds of performances with one of Europe’s major music-business gatherings. The City of Hamburg describes it as Europe’s largest platform for pop culture and the music industry and lists more than 300 live acts in the 2026 program.
NDR’s festival reporting counts the program somewhat differently, citing more than 400 acts across roughly 70 venues. The exact total depends on how the broader program is counted, but the scale is clear. Reeperbahn temporarily turns the neighborhood into a concentrated international showcase circuit.
Against that backdrop, Anchor narrows attention to six emerging acts and asks the jury to compare radically different kinds of live music. The 2026 shortlist moved between electronic pop, soul, jazz, Italo-disco and GANNA’s own collision of Ukrainian tradition and experimentation.
The genre spread is precisely why the judging criteria matter. MusikWoche’s nominee announcement identified artistic originality, innovation and international potential as qualities associated with the award, while the actual festival judging placed particular weight on what each act could produce in front of an audience.
GANNA did not win a folk category or a jazz category. She won while being compared with five acts making very different music.
Ukraine Takes a Bigger Role in Hamburg
Her victory also arrives during Reeperbahn’s most deliberate Ukrainian spotlight to date.
Ukraine became the festival’s first official Guest Country of Honour in 2026. Pollstar’s program report details a delegation represented by Music Export Ukraine that includes artists and music-industry professionals rather than presenting Ukrainian music as a single showcase or genre.
The musical range makes the point. GANNA brings folk traditions into electronics, jazz and improvisation. Maryna Krut has developed contemporary music around the bandura, while Kazhanna represents another side of the country’s current pop landscape.
For GANNA, the cultural context is unusually close to the actual mechanics of her music. Ukrainian identity is not a theme attached to the project because Reeperbahn chose Ukraine for a festival program. It is embedded in the melodies, vocal traditions and research that precede the contemporary arrangements.
That creates an important distinction between preservation and replication. Keeping traditional music alive does not necessarily require performing it exactly as it existed before. GANNA’s work proposes that preservation can also happen when old material remains active enough to be rearranged, improvised over and heard by audiences far from where it originated.
The Prize Adds Practical Momentum
Winning Anchor does not suddenly make GANNA a new artist.
Her work had already reached international audiences before Reeperbahn. F-Cat lists appearances at WOMEX and ESNS alongside her current festival activity, while KUPALA and UTOPIA had established two different recorded snapshots of the project before the jury encountered her in Hamburg.
What the award changes is the concentration of attention around that work.
Reeperbahn is simultaneously a public festival and an industry meeting point. Around 4,500 professional delegates attend its conference in a typical year, according to Hamburg’s festival overview, bringing artists into proximity with booking agents, promoters, labels, publishers, managers and other parts of the European music business.
The Anchor package can help turn that attention into something practical. A month of tour-bus access addresses an expensive part of moving a live project between cities. The €20,000 technology voucher is particularly relevant for an artist whose solo performances rely on electronics, looping, effects and other equipment alongside the voice.
None of that guarantees what happens after Hamburg. Showcase awards can create visibility, but artists still have to convert a burst of industry attention into future shows, collaborators and audiences.
GANNA leaves Reeperbahn with considerably more than a mention on a winners list.
The Old Songs Never Had to Stand Still
The strongest detail in GANNA’s Anchor victory may be that the traditional material did not need to become simpler to work inside an international showcase competition.
Her music can be rhythmically unusual, electronically processed and open to improvisation. Ukrainian roots remain audible without forcing the arrangements to behave like historical reconstructions. That tension is where the project becomes contemporary.
It also helps explain the jury’s emotional response. The performance was not being evaluated because it represented Ukraine or because traditional music deserves preservation. GANNA was one of six emerging live acts competing under the same award, and the jury chose what happened when her music reached the room.
On September 18th, that was enough to put the 2026 Anchor Award in Ganna Gryniva’s hands.
The old songs were still there. The point was never to leave them untouched.