The organizers of the Big Book Literary Award have presented the list of nominees for this season’s award. It includes 51 works, including new works by writers Evgeny Vodolazkin, Zakhar Prilepin, Alexei Salnikov and others. Finalists to be determined June 1 The Big Book National Literary Awards announced the long list of nominees for this year’s award. In total, it included 51 works by writers from 16 cities of Russia, as well as four countries of the world: Austria, Belarus, Great Britain and Georgia. A long list of documentary and fiction novels was published on the official website of the award organizers.
Among the nominees for the award are the novel “Chagin” by Evgeny Vodolazkin, the documentary prose “Sholokhov. Illegal” by Zakhar Prilepin, the novel “Occulttrager” by Alexei Salnikov, the novel “Alice in the Russian Looking Glass” by Pavel Basinsky and Ekaterina Barbanyaga, the novel “Rose” by Oksana Vasyakina and others. Writer Roman Senchin, who is one of the experts of the award, noted two trends in the works of the long list: “First, in many works the protagonist has unusual abilities. He (she) either hears voices, or remembers what has been read, heard, or is able to see the past or the future. The second trend is that the beginning of many works is the discovery of a certain manuscript on the mezzanine, in a chest, a diplomat. Genres are varied. There are science fiction and fantasy, there are detective stories and investigations, there are historical novels, non-fiction studies.”
The shortlist of the award finalists will be announced on June 1, ahead of the Red Square Book Festival. The winners will be awarded at a ceremony in December. “The long list this season contains three intrigues. First, a relatively large number of poets who suddenly (or expectedly) turned to prose. Further, the final consolidation of the next “generation of thirty-year-olds”: such names of the corresponding clips appeared in the 1920s, in the seventies and nineties – a new time has come for them. Finally – and the absence of clear contenders for the victory “on the basis of total merit,” commented Dmitry Bak, director of the State Literary Museum and chairman of the Literary Academy – the jury of the Big Book award. Last year, the Big Book award was received by the writer and literary critic Pavel Basinsky for his novel The True Story of Anna Karenina, a “guide” to Leo Tolstoy’s novel, in which Basinsky draws readers’ attention to the details of the work, explores the prototypes of the characters and analyzes the text of the book in order to understand the phenomenon of Anna Karenina. And in 2021, the writer Leonid Yuzefovich became the winner of the award for the novel “Fillellen” about a retired staff captain and participant in the Patriotic War of 1812 Grigory Mostsepanov, invited by Count Demidov as a teacher in Nizhny Tagil after leaving the army due to disability. The Big Book Prize was established in 2005. The monetary reward for the first place is 3 million rubles, for the second – 1.5 million rubles, and for the third – 1 million rubles. The founder of the award is the Center for the Support of Russian Literature.
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