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.