Pushkin House Russian Book Prize

The advisory board for the prize is made up of Russia experts including Rodric Braithwaite, Andrew Jack, Bridget Kendall, Andrew Nurnberg, Marc Polonsky, and Douglas Smith.

Pushkin House Russian Book Prize winners and shortlists • Year — Author(s) — Title — Publisher — Result — Ref. • 2013 — Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy — Farrar, Straus and Giroux — Winner • Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956 — Allen Lane — Shortlist • ' — Riverhead Books — Shortlist • Wheel of Fortune: The Battle for Oil and Power in Russia — Harvard University Press — Shortlist • Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia’s Cold War Generation — Oxford University Press — Shortlist • Moscow 1937 — Polity — Shortlist • 2014 — Red Fortress: The Secret Heart of Russia's History — Allen Lane — Winner • ' — Head of Zeus — Shortlist • I.B. Tauris — Shortlist • Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America — Bloomsbury — Shortlist • Anya von Bremzen — Mastering The Art of Soviet Cooking — Transworld — Shortlist • Mussorgsky and His Circle: a Russian Musical Adventure — Faber and Faber — Shortlist • 2015 — Oneworld Publications — Winner • and Petra Couvée — Harvill Secker/Vintage Books — Shortlist •, trans. by Antonia Lloyd-Jones — Kolyma Diaries: A Journey into Russia’s Haunted Hinterland — Portobello Books — Shortlist • St Petersburg: Shadows of the Past — Yale University Press — Shortlist • Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 — Penguin Press — Shortlist • Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia — Faber and Faber — Shortlist • 2016 — Towards the Flame: Empire, War and the End of Tsarist Russia — Penguin Press — Winner • (ed.) — Maisky Diaries: Red Ambassador to the Court of St James’s 1932-43 — Yale University Press — Shortlist •, trans. by Nora Seligman Favorov — Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator — Yale University Press — Shortlist • Russia and the New World Disorder — Brookings Institution — Shortlist • Stalin and the Struggle for Supremacy in Eurasia — Cambridge University Press — Shortlist • Pan Macmillan — Shortlist • 2017 — Yale University Press — Winner • Allen Lane — Shortlist • Putin Country: A Journey into the Real Russia — Farrar, Straus and Giroux — Shortlist • Orion — Shortlist • Bolshoi Confidential: Secrets of the Russian Ballet from the Tsars to Today — Fourth Estate — Shortlist • Teffi, trans. by Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, Anne Marie Jackson and Irina Steinberg with an introduction by Edyth C. Haber — Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea — Pushkin Press — Shortlist • 2018 — Harvard University Press — Winner • Armageddon and Paranoia: The Nuclear Confrontation — Profile Books — Shortlist •, trans. from Russian by Thomas Campbell — Other Russias — Penguin (first pub. by N+1) — Shortlist •, trans. from French by Ros Schwartz — Stalin’s Meteorologist: One Man’s Untold Story of Love, Life, and Death — Penguin — Shortlist • Princeton University Press — Shortlist • Gorbachev: His Life and Times — Simon & Schuster — Shortlist • 2019 — Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe — Penguin — Winner • 1983: The World at the Brink — Little, Brown Book Group — Shortlist • Yale University Press — Shortlist • To See Paris And Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture — Harvard University Press — Shortlist • Viking — Shortlist • Maybe Esther: A Family Story — 4th Estate — Shortlist • 2020 — Polity — Winner • Stalin's Scribe: The Life of Mikhail Sholokhov — Pegasus Books — Shortlist • Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future — W. W. Norton & Company — Shortlist • Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait — W. W. Norton & Company — Shortlist • An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin’s Master Agent — Bloomsbury — Shortlist • This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible in Stalin's Russia — Cornell University Press — Shortlist • 2021 — Oxford University Press — Winner • Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West — Picador — Shortlist • Late Stalinism: The Aesthetics of Politics — Yale University Press — Shortlist • Oxford University Press — Shortlist • Leo Tolstoy — Reaktion Books — Shortlist • Moscow Monumental: Soviet Skyscrapers and Urban Life in Stalin's Capital — Princeton University Press — Shortlist • 2022 — Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate — Yale University Press — Winner • and Caroline Humphrey — On the Edge: Life along the Russia-China Border — Harvard University Press — Shortlist •, Morvan Lallouet and Ben Noble — Navalny: Putin's Nemesis, Russia's Future? — Oxford University Press — Shortlist • Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin's Russia — Princeton University Press — Shortlist • Klimat: Russia in the Age of Climate Change — Harvard University Press — Shortlist • In Memory of Memory — New Directions Publishing — Shortlist • Stalin’s Architect: Power and Survival in Moscow — MIT Press — Shortlist • Oneworld Publications — Shortlist • Playing with Fire: The Story of Maria Yudina- Pianist in Stalin’s Russia — Yale University Press — Shortlist • Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union — Yale University Press — Shortlist • 2023 — Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin and Russia’s War Against Ukraine — Mudlark — Winner • Red Leviathan: The Secret History of Soviet Whaling — University of Chicago Press — Shortlist • Russia’s War — Polity — Shortlist • Places of Tenderness and Heat: The Queer Milieu of Fin-de-Siècle St. Petersburg — Cornell University Press — Shortlist • Muppets in Moscow: The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia — Rowman & Littlefield Publishers — Shortlist • Cigarettes and Soviets: Smoking in the USSR — Cornell University Press — Shortlist • 2024 — Elena Kostyuchenko — I Love Russia: Reporting from a Lost Country by Elena Kostyuchenko — Bodley Head — Winner • Julie A. Cassiday — Russian Style: Performing Gender, Power, and Putinism — University of Wisconsin Press — Shortlist • Dan Healey — The Gulag Doctors: Life, Death, and Medicine in Stalin's Labour Camps — Yale University Press — Shortlist • Tom Parfitt — High Caucasus: A Mountain Quest in Russia's Haunted Hinterland — Headline Book Publishing — Shortlist • Serhii Plokhy — The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History — Allen Lane — Shortlist • Laur Vallikivi — Words and Silences: Nenets Reindeer Herders and Russian Evangelical Missionaries in the Post-Soviet Arctic — Indiana University Press — Shortlist • 2025 — Benjamin Nathans — To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement — Princeton University Press — Winner • Howard Amos — Russia Starts Here: Real Lives in the Ruins of Empire — Bloomsbury Continuum — Shortlist • Lucy Ash — The Baton and the Cross: Russia's Church from Pagans to Putin — Icon Books — Shortlist • Alexei Navalny, translated by Arch Tait & Stephen Dalziel — Patriot — Bodley Head — Shortlist • Sergey Radchenko — To Run the World: The Kremlin's Cold War Bid for Global Power — Cambridge University Press — Shortlist • Donald Rayfield — 'A Seditious and Sinister Tribe’: The Crimean Tatars and Their Khanate — Reaktion Books — Shortlist