Zoom Event: Kate Brown in Conversation with Serhii Plokhy ‘Manual for Survival’

Join Pushkin House for an evening with Kate Brown whose book ‘Manual for Survival’ has been shortlisted for the Pushkin House Book Prize 2020.

Kate will be in conversation with Serhii Plokhy, chair of the 2020 Prize judges and twice winner of the Pushkin House Book Prize in 2015 and 2019.

After the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, international aid organisations sought to help the victims but were stymied by post-Soviet political roadblocks. Efforts to gain access to the site of catastrophic radiation damage were denied, and the residents of Chernobyl were given no answers as their lives hung in the balance. Drawing on a decade of archival research and on-the-ground interviews in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus, Kate Brown unveils the full breadth of the devastation and the whitewash that followed. Her findings make clear the irreversible impact of man-made radioactivity on every living thing; and hauntingly, they force us to confront the untold legacy of decades of weapons-testing and other catastrophic nuclear incidents.

In English.