Applebaum wins Duff Cooper Prize for a second time

Anne Applebaum has won the Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize for a second time, with victory for her account of the great Ukrainian famine of the early 1930’s, Red Famine (Penguin).

Applebaum, the only author to have claimed the award twice, first won in 2004 with the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Gulag. She was presented again with the £5,000 prize, celebrating "the best in non-fiction writing", at a reception in the French Embassy by the French Ambassador Jean-Pierre Jouyet on Thursday evening (10th May).

The book explores Stalin's role in the famine that resulted in the starvation of nearly four million Ukrainians between1932 and 1933. "It is the fullest account yet published of these terrible events," according to the prize.

Artemis Cooper, chair of the Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize judges, said: "In this beautifully-written book, Applebaum takes the reader through one of the most appalling episodes of the Soviet past. Not every historian can look with such an unflinching gaze into the depths of evil and human misery, and write about it with such clarity and compassion."

Now administered New College, Oxford, the first Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize was made in 1956 to Alan Moorehead for his book Gallipoli and has been awarded annually ever since.