"I wrote it to tell the truth, because that is what literature is for", Twardoch said from the stage in Warsaw on Sunday.
The book, published by Marginesy in 2025, also won the Nike Readers' poll run by the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza.
Jury chairman Witold Bereś said the novel's protagonist, a Polish volunteer nicknamed Koń (Horse), goes to the front simply because he considers Russian aggression evil. He also praised the book's raw, front-line language, which mixes swearing, Russianisms, Ukrainianisms and modern military jargon. "This is a language devoid of political correctness, created to describe this war", Bereś said.
He said the award came as hostility towards Ukrainians grows in Poland. "Null", he added, is not a political leaflet against that mood, but it does not let readers look away from another human being. He also called it a book about loneliness in the face of technology, and about the fear that drones could one day reach Poland.
Twardoch has said the characters and events are fictional, and that the brigade numbers given do not exist. But he told the Polish Press Agency (PAP) in 2025 that he invented very little, describing what he had seen or been told.
He has spent years helping Ukraine's armed forces. Since 2022 he has raised PLN 2 million (EUR 456,000) in public collections and delivered drones, vehicles and equipment to the front himself. "In that sense it is my war," he told PAP.
Twardoch, who lives in Pilchowice in Upper Silesia, has written more than a dozen novels and story collections that have sold over a million copies.
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Source: PAP