The 5th Pushkin House Annual Book Prize Award Ceremony & Dinner

Which of the six highly readable books on this year’s Pushkin House Book Prize shortlist will win the £5,000 prize? Meet the shortlisted authors, jurors and other distinguished guests at our awards dinner as the winner is unveiled in the beautiful surroundings of The Charterhouse, one of London’s best-kept secrets.

The 2017 shortlist is an ecclectic one, covering history, reportage, art, ballet and memoir: 

Daniel Beer, The House of the Dead (Allen Lane)

Rosalind P. Blakesley, The Russian Canvas (Yale University Press)

Anne Garrels, Putin Country (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Simon Morrison, Bolshoi Confidential (Fourth Estate)

Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs (Orion)

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)

Announcing the shortlist in April, Simon Franklin, professor of Slavonic Studies at Cambridge University and chair of the judges, said: “There was a really impressive range of entrants, full of original research, illuminating insights, thoughtful argument and engaging exposition, which made it difficult to pick just six. It is a wonderfully diverse selection, spanning palaces and prisons, painting and politics, Petersburg and the provinces. Any would be a worthy winner.”

Simon Franklin’s co-judges are: Anne Applebaum, visiting professor at the London School of Economics and Washington Post columnist; Petr Aven, supervisory board member of Alfa Group Consortium; Charlotte Hobson, author, journalist and translator; and Dominic Lieven, senior research fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, and winner of the 2016 Pushkin House Russian Book Prize.

About The Charterhouse

The Charterhouse is a former 14th-century Carthusian monastery and burial ground for victims of the Black Death, which opened its doors to the public for the first time in 400 years earlier this year.  The complex of almshouses, preserved among tower blocks, is surrounded by gardens and cobbled courtyards just round the corner from Farringdon Station and the Smithfield Meat Market. It still provides homes for life to 40 men, known as brothers, and for the first time women are now also welcome to apply for places.