Read Russia Journal

Read Russia Announces the READ RUSSIA PRIZE 2020 Shortlist

Read Russia PrizesNew York, August 17, 2020 – Read Russia is delighted to announce the shortlist for the 2020 READ RUSSIA PRIZE. 

The shortlist of five titles has been selected by the READ RUSSIA PRIZE jurors for their quality, excellence, and contribution to Russian literature in the Anglophone world. 

The PRIZE winner(s) will be decided and announced this September. 

 
 

READ RUSSIA PRIZE 2020 Shortlist

Alexander Griboedov, WOE FROM WIT, translated by Betsy Hulick (Columbia University Press / Russian Library 2020) 

Vasily Grossman, STALINGRAD, translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler (Harvill Secker and New York Review Books, 2019) 

Maxim Osipov, ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS, translated by Boris Dralyuk, Alex Fleming, and Anne Marie Jackson (New York Review Books, 2019) 

Alexander Pushkin, SELECTED POETRY, translated by Antony Wood (Penguin Random House 2020)  

Guzel Yakhina, ZULEIKHA, translated by Lisa C. Hayden (Oneworld, 2019)  

Short list book covers


Read Excerpts from the Read Russia Prize 2020 Shortlisted Books


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). 

About 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).