Books by Rogoff and McGlynn shortlisted for £10k Pushkin House Book Prize

Six books have been shortlisted for the £10,000 Pushkin House Book Prize, launched in 2013 to encourage public understanding and intelligent debate about Russia and highlight “the best contemporary non-fiction writing on Russia’s complex culture, history and people".

This year’s shortlisted titles, featuring Muppets in Moscow: The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia by Natasha Lance Rogoff (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers) and Russia’s War by Jade McGlynn (Polity), provide insight into the Russo-Ukrainian war; illicit gay relationships in pre-Soviet Russia; the near extinction of whales; Soviet tobacco habits; and the cultural perils of translating ’Sesame Street’ into Russian.

Also up for the prize are: Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin and Russia’s War Against Ukraine by Owen Matthews (Mudlark); Places of Tenderness and Heat: The Queer Milieu of Fin-de-Siècle St Petersburg by Olga Petri (Cornell University Press); Cigarettes and Soviets: Smoking in the USSR (Northern Illinois University Press Series in Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies) by Tricia Starks and Red Leviathan: The Secret History of Soviet Whaling by Ryan Tucker Jones (University of Chicago Press).

The £10,000 prize will be awarded to the overall winner on 15th June, with the annual award ceremony dinner to take place at Pushkin House in London. Judges for this year’s prize are professor of Russian Literature and Music at the University of Oxford, Philip Bullock; activist, author, staff writer for the New Yorker and professor of writing at Bard College, Masha Gessen; Ukrainian film producer and director, Alexander Rodnyansky; the Pushkin House Book Prize 2022 winner, Professor Mary Elise Sarotte; and Bosch Academy Richard von Weizsäcker fellow and political commentator, Ekaterina Schulmann.

The prize will be awarded to the author of the best book which combines excellence in research with readability, illuminating Russia’s history, culture and people, and published in English for the first time since 24th February 2022. Translations from other languages are eligible and actively sought.

Previous winners include: Rosalind Blakesley for The Russian Canvas (Yale University Press); Archie Brown for The Human Factor: Gorbachev, Raegan, and Thatcher and the End of the Cold War (Oxford University Press) and Dominic Lieven for Towards the Flame (Penguin).