The Pushkin House Book Prize is an annual book prize, awarded to the best non-fiction writing on Russia in the English language. The prize was inaugurated in 2013. The prize amount as of 2020 has been £10,000. The advisory board for the prize is made up of Russia experts including Rodric Braithwaite, Andrew Jack, Bridget Kendall, Andrew Nurnberg, Marc Polonsky, and Douglas Smith.[1]
Year | Author(s) | Title | Publisher | Result | Ref. |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
2013[a] | Douglas Smith | Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy | Winner | [2] | |
Anne Applebaum | Iron Curtain | Shortlist | [2] | ||
Masha Gessen | The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin | Shortlist | [2] | ||
Thane Gustafson | Wheel of Fortune | Shortlist | [2] | ||
Donald Raleigh | Soviet Baby Boomers | Shortlist | [2] | ||
Karl Schlögel | Moscow 1937 | Shortlist | [2] | ||
2014[b] | Catherine Merridale | Red Fortress: The Secret Heart of Russia's History | Allen Lane | Winner | [3] |
Vladimir Alexandrov | The Black Russian | Head of Zeus | Shortlist | [3] | |
Sheila Fitzpatrick | A Spy in the Archives: a Memoir of Cold War Russia | IB Taurus | Shortlist | [3] | |
Owen Matthews | Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America | Bloomsbury | Shortlist | [3] | |
Anya von Bremzen | Mastering The Art of Soviet Cooking | Transworld | Shortlist | [3] | |
Stephen Walsh | Mussorgsky and His Circle: a Russian Musical Adventure | Faber and Faber | Shortlist | [3] | |
2015[c] | Serhii Plokhy | The Last Empire: The final days of the Soviet Union | Oneworld Publications | Winner | [4] |
Peter Finn and Petra Couvée | The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the battle over a forbidden book | Harvill Secker/Vintage Books | Shortlist | [4] | |
Jacek Hugo, trans. by Antonia Lloyd-Jones | Bader- Kolyma Diaries: A Journey into Russia’s haunted hinterland | Portobello Books | Shortlist | [4] | |
Catriona Kelly | St Petersburg: Shadows of the past | Yale University Press | Shortlist | [4] | |
Stephen Kotkin | Stalin Volume I: Paradoxes of power,1878-1928 | Penguin Press | Shortlist | [4] | |
Peter Pomerantsev | Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia | Faber and Faber | Shortlist | [4] | |
2016[d] | Dominic Lieven | Towards the Flame: Empire, War and the End of Tsarist Russia | Penguin Press | Winner | [5] |
Gabriel Gorodetsky (ed.) | Maisky Diaries: Red Ambassador to the Court of St James’s 1932-43 | Yale University Press | Shortlist | [5] | |
Oleg Khlevniuk, trans. by Nora Seligman Favorov | Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator[e] | Yale University Press | Shortlist | [5] | |
Bobo Lo | Russia and the New World Disorder | Brookings Institution | Shortlist | [5] | |
Alfred Rieber | Stalin and the Struggle for Supremacy in Eurasia | Cambridge University Press | Shortlist | [5] | |
Robert Service | The End of the Cold War: 1985-1991 | Pan Macmillan | Shortlist | [5] | |
2017[f] | Rosalind Blakesley | The Russian Canvas: Painting in Imperial Russia 1757-1881 | Yale University Press | Winner | [6] |
Daniel Beer | The House of the Dead | Allen Lane | Shortlist | [6] | |
Anne Garrels | Putin Country | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | Shortlist | [6] | |
Simon Sebag Montefiore | The Romanovs | Orion | Shortlist | [6] | |
Simon Morrison | Bolshoi Confidential | Fourth Estate | Shortlist | [6] | |
Teffi, trans. by Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, Anne Marie Jackson and Irina Steinberg with an introduction by Edyth C. Haber | Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea[g] | Pushkin Press | Shortlist | [6] | |
2018[h] | Alexis Peri | The War Within: Diaries From the Siege of Leningrad | Harvard University Press | Winner | [7] |
Rodric Braithwaite | Armageddon and Paranoia: The Nuclear Confrontation | Profile Books | Shortlist | [7] | |
Victoria Lomasko, trans. from Russian by Thomas Campbell | Other Russias[i] | Penguin (first pub. by N+1) | Shortlist | [7] | |
Olivier Rolin, trans. from French by Ros Schwartz | Stalin’s Meteorologist: One Man’s Untold Story of Love, Life, and Death | Penguin | Shortlist | [7] | |
Yuri Slezkine | The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution | Princeton University Press | Shortlist | [7] | |
William Taubman | Gorbachev: His Life and Times | Simon & Schuster | Shortlist | [7] | |
2019[j] | Serhii Plokhy | Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe | Penguin | Winner | [8] |
Taylor Downing | 1983: The World at the Brink | Little, Brown Book Group | Shortlist | [8] | |
Mark Galeotti | The Vory: Russia’s Super Mafia | Yale University Press | Shortlist | [8] | |
Eleonory Gilburd | To See Paris And Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture | Harvard University Press | Shortlist | [8] | |
Ben Macintyre | The Spy and the Traitor | Viking | Shortlist | [8] | |
Katja Petrowskaja | Maybe Esther: A Family Story | 4th Estate | Shortlist | [8] | |
2020[k] | Sergei Medvedev | The Return of the Russian Leviathan | Winner | [9][10] | |
Brian Boeck | Stalin's Scribe: The Life of Mikhail Sholokhov | Shortlist | [9] | ||
Kate Brown | Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future | Shortlist | [9] | ||
Bathsheba Demuth | Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait | Shortlist | [9] | ||
Owen Matthews | An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin’s Master Agent | Shortlist | [9] | ||
Joan Neuberger | This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible in Stalin's Russia | Shortlist | [9] | ||
2021[l] | Archie Brown | The Human Factor | Winner | ||
Catherine Belton | Putin’s People | Shortlist | |||
Evgeny Dobrenko | Late Stalinism | Shortlist | |||
Jonathan Schneer | The Lockhart Plot | Shortlist | |||
Andrei Zorin | Leo Tolstoy | Shortlist | |||
Katherine Zubovich | Moscow Monumental | Shortlist | |||
2022[m] | Mary Sarotte | Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate | Winner | [12][13] | |
Frank Billé and Caroline Humphrey | On the Edge: Life along the Russia-China Border | Shortlist | [14] | ||
Jan Matti Dollbaum | Morvan Lallouet and Ben Noble- Navalny: Putin's Nemesis, Russia's Future? | Shortlist | |||
Timothy Frye | Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin's Russia | Shortlist | [15] | ||
Thane Gustafson | Klimat: Russia in the Age of Climate Change | Shortlist | [16] | ||
Maria Stepanova | In Memory of Memory | Shortlist | [17] | ||
Deyan Sudjic | Stalin’s Architect: Power and Survival in Moscow | Shortlist | [18] | ||
Lucy Ward | The Empress and the English Doctor: How Catherine the Great Defied a Deadly Virus | Shortlist | [19] | ||
Elizabeth Wilson | Playing with Fire: The Story of Maria Yudina- Pianist in Stalin’s Russia | Shortlist | [20] | ||
Vladislav Zubok | Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union | Shortlist | [21] | ||
2023[n] | Owen Matthews | Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin and Russia’s War Against Ukraine | Winner | [22] | |
Ryan Tucker Jones | Red Leviathan: The Secret History of Soviet Whaling | Shortlist | [23][24] | ||
Jade McGlynn | Russia’s War | Shortlist | [23][24] | ||
Olga Petri | Places of Tenderness and Heat: The Queer Milieu of Fin-de-Siècle St. Petersburg | Shortlist | [23][24] | ||
Natasha Lance Rogoff | Muppets in Moscow: The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia | Shortlist | [23][24] | ||
Tricia Starks | Cigarettes and Soviets: Smoking in the USSR | NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies | Shortlist | [23][24] |