2019 Pushkin House Book Prize goes to Serhii Plokhy’s ‘Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy’
Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy by Harvard historian Serhii Plokhy has been named the winner of the 2019 Pushkin House Book Prize, which honors English-language nonfiction about the Russian-speaking world. Plokhy previously won the Pushkin Prize for The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union, making him the first author to win the award twice. A £5,000 ($6,343) prize was awarded to Plokhy today in a London ceremony.
The following titles were also shortlisted for the award:
- 1983: The World at The Brink by Taylor Downing
- The Vory: Russia’s Super Mafia by Mark Galeotti
- To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture by Eleonory Gilburd
- The Spy and the Traitor by Ben Macintyre
- Maybe Esther by Katja Petrowskaja, translated from German by Shelley Frisch
The Pushkin Prize jury’s recognition of Chernobyl, which undertakes a wide-ranging investigation into the 1986 nuclear disaster’s origin, containment, and consequences, coincides with a wave of public interest in the disaster sparked by a commercially unrelated HBO series also titled Chernobyl.
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