Read Russia Journal

Announcing the READ RUSSIA PRIZE 2020 Longlist

Read Russia Prize 2020Read Russia is pleased to announce the longlist for the 2020 READ RUSSIA PRIZE.

The nominations received for this year’s award honored the breadth and diversity of work by Russian authors and their English-language translators across a wide range of genres and from classic to contemporary writing.

A longlist of 20 titles has been selected by the READ RUSSIA PRIZE jurors for their quality, excellence, and contribution to Russian literature in the Anglophone world. The shortlist will be decided and announced in August.

The READ RUSSIA PRIZE Longlist

  • Narine Abgaryan, THREE APPLES FELL FROM THE SKY, translated by Lisa C. Hayden (Oneworld, 2020) 
  • Yuz Aleshkovsky, NIKOLAI NIKOLAEVICH AND CAMOUFLAGE, translated by Duffield White (Columbia University Press / Russian Library 2019) 
  • Sergei Gandlevsky, ILLEGIBLE: A NOVEL, translated by Susanne Fusso (Cornell University Press, 2019) 
  • Alisa Ganieva, BRIDE AND GROOM, translated by Carol Apollonio (Deep Vellum, 2018) 
  • Alexander Griboedov, WOE FROM WIT, translated by Betsy Hulick (Columbia University Press / Russian Library 2020) 
  • Alexander Grin, FANDANGO AND OTHER STORIES, translated by Bryan Karetnyk (Columbia University Press / Russian Library 2020) 
  • Vasily Grossman, STALINGRAD, translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler (New York Review Books, 2019) 
  • Vladislav Khodasevich, NECROPOLIS, translated by Sarah Vitali (Columbia University Press / Russian Library 2020)
  • Sergei Lebedev, THE GOOSE FRITZ, translated by Antonina W. Bouis (New Vessel Press, 2019) 
  • Maxim Osipov, ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS, translated by Boris Dralyuk and Alex Fleming (New York Review Books, 2019) 
  • Lev Ozerov, PORTRAITS WITHOUT FRAMES, translated by Robert Chandler, Boris Dralyuk, Maria Bloshteyn and Irina Mashinski (New York Review Books, 2018) 
  • Karolina Pavlova, A DOUBLE LIFE, translated by Barbara Heldt (Columbia University Press / Russian Library 2019) 
  • Dmitri Prigov, SOVIET TEXTS, translated by Simon Schuchat and Ainsley Morse (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020)  
  • Alexander Pushkin, SELECTED POETRY, translated by Antony Wood (Penguin Random House 2020)  
  • Varlam Shalamov, KOLYMA STORIES, translated by Donald Rayfield (New York Review Books, 2018) 
  • Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, MARCH 1917, THE RED WHEEL / NODE III (8 MARCH – 31 MARCH) BOOK 2, translated by Marian Schwartz (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019) 
  • Eugene Vodolazkin, SOLOVYOV AND LARIONOV, translated by Lisa C. Hayden (Oneworld, 2018) 
  • Guzel Yakhina, ZULEIKHA, translated by Lisa C. Hayden (Oneworld, 2019)  
  • Yulia Yakovleva, THE RAVEN’S CHILDREN, translated by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp (Puffin, 2018) 
  • Mikhail Zoshchenko, SENTIMENTAL TALES, translated by Boris Dralyuk (Columbia University Press / Russian Library 2020) 

Books nominated for the 2020 Read Russia Prize

About the READ RUSSIA PRIZE

The READ RUSSIA PRIZE is awarded every two years for works of Russian literature published in new English translations. All publishers of Russian literature in English translation are invited to submit translations newly published between 2018 and 2020 in any of the following categories:

  • 19th-century fiction written between 1800 and 1900;
  • 20th-century fiction written between 1900 and 1990;
  • contemporary fiction written after 1990;
  • poetry (both classic and contemporary) and drama.

The winner(s) will receive an award of up to $10,000, divided at the discretion of the Prize jury between the translator(s) of the work and the English-language publishing house (s). Previous READ RUSSIA PRIZE winners include, in 2018, Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, Anne Marie Jackson, and Irina Steinberg for their translation of Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea by Teffi (Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya) (New York Review Books and Pushkin Press); in 2016, Oliver Ready, for his translation of the novel Before and During by Vladimir Sharov (Dedalus Books); and in 2014, and Joanna Turnbull and Nikolai Formozov for their translation of Autobiography of a Corpse, a collection of tales from Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (New York Review Books). 

Members of the READ RUSSIA PRIZE Jury

Bryan KaretnykBryan Karetnyk is a teaching fellow in Russian literature and culture at University College London. He is the editor and principal translator of the award-winning landmark anthology Russian Émigré Short Stories from Bunin to Yanovsky (Penguin Classics, 2017), and his book-length translations include Gaito Gazdanov’s The Spectre of Alexander Wolf, The Flight and An Evening with Claire (Pushkin Press, 2013, 2016 and 2020), Irina Odoevtseva’s Isolde (with Irina Steinberg; Pushkin Press, 2019) and Alexander Grin’s Fandango and Other Stories (Columbia University Press, 2020). His forthcoming translations include major works by Yuri Felsen and Boris Poplavsky.

Muireann MaguireMuireann Maguire is Senior Lecturer in Russian at the University of Exeter, and the author of Stalin’s Ghosts: Gothic Themes in Early Soviet Literature (Peter Lang, 2012), a study of Gothic-fantastic motifs in early Soviet literature. She is currently working on a second monograph about the depiction of maternity in Russian 19th- and 20th-century fiction, Hideous Agonies: Plotting Pregnancy in Russian Literature. As a freelance translator from Russian, she has translated various literary fictions, including the stories in her edited collection Red Spectres: Russian 20th-Century Gothic-Fantastic Tales (Overlook, 2013). She is the Principal Investigator on a European Research Council-funded Horizon 2020 grant, “RusTrans: The Dark Side of Translation: 20th and 21st Century Translation from Russian as a Political Phenomenon in the UK, Ireland, and the USA.”

Anastasia TolstoyAnastasia Tolstoy is Junior Research Fellow in European Literature at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. She holds a doctorate from Oxford, where she completed her DPhil on Vladimir Nabokov and the Aesthetics of Disgust. Alongside Distinguished Professor Brian Boyd, she recently co-edited and translated a volume of Nabokov’s collected essays, reviews and interviews, Think, Write, Speak (Knopf | Penguin Random House, 2019). She is the co-translator, with Thomas Karshan, of Nabokov’s neo-Shakespearean blank verse drama The Tragedy of Mister Morn (Knopf | Penguin Random House, 2012).