Pushkin House has announced the short list for this year’s Book Prize. They are:
- Russia Starts Here: Real Lives in the Ruins of Empire by Howard Amos
- The Baton and the Cross: Russia's Church from Pagans to Putin by Lucy Ash
- Patriot by Alexei Navalny, translated by Arch Tait and Stephen Dalziel
- To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement by Benjamin Nathans
- To Run the World: The Kremlin's Cold War Bid for Global Power by Sergey Radchenko
- ‘A Seditious and Sinister Tribe’: The Crimean Tatars and Their Khanate by Donald Rayfield
These six books will be read and debated by this year’s jury, which is chaired by Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, Professor of Russian Politics and Director of the King's Russia Institute at King’s College London. The other jury members are: Tony Barber, a former Financial Times columnist and foreign correspondent in Austria, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Poland, the US, the former Soviet Union, and the former Yugoslavia; Polina Barskova scholar and a poet, author of thirteen collections of poems and three books of prose in Russian; Sir Laurie Bristow KCMG, President of Hughes Hall, University of Cambridge who served as Ambassador to Afghanistan in 2021 and as Ambassador to Russia from 2016 to 2020; and Elena Kostyuchenko, a journalist, writer and LGBTQ+ activist, currently a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, who was awarded the Pushkin House Book Prize 2024 for “I Love Russia: Reporting from a Lost Country.”
The winning book will be announced at the Book Prize Award Ceremony at the Foundling Museum in Bloomsbury on 19 June. The evening will be hosted by Andrew Jack, founder of the Prize, and Elena Sudakova, Executive Director of Pushkin House. The winner of the Book Prize is awarded £10,000.
The Pushkin House Book Prize was inaugurated in 2013 to showcase the best new non-fiction books published in English that examine Russian culture, history, politics and more. It looks beyond the borders of modern Russia, to include countries, nations and communities which have been affected by the Russian Empire, Soviet Union or Russian Federation. The Prize rewards books that are well-written, well-researched and accessible to the non-specialist reader.
The Pushkin House Book Prize is generously supported by Douglas Smith and Stephanie Ellis-Smith, and the Polonsky Foundation.
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