“Book of the Year” announced the winners – MK

The Stanislavsky Electrotheatre hosted an awards ceremony for the winners of one of the key literary competitions in Russia

On the evening of August 31, the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre awarded the winners of the national competition Book of the Year. This event has become a “visiting” part of the MIBF. Mikhail Shvydkoy arrived at the ceremony, as they say, from the ship to the ball. “I’ve just come from the fair, probably like many in the hall,” said the President’s special envoy for international cultural cooperation.

In the former drama theater on the street. Tverskoy, 23 it was really crowded yesterday, as the MK correspondent was convinced. A full hall plus balconies – so many people wanted to see the final event of the “Book of the Year” (or came for an award). There were even a couple of hitches when the laureates needed time to “get” to the stage – they were sitting so far from the place of presentation, but the presenters and the authors themselves reacted to everything with humor. “Book of the Year” is a dozen nominations and the Grand Prix. Naturally, the super prize was left for dessert, but I will confuse the cards for the organizers and start with the main award. It was presented personally by the director of the Foreign Intelligence Service (and chairman of the RVIO) Sergei Naryshkin. Despite the fact that a collection of poems about the special operation was included in the shortlist, the jury did not appreciate the hasty responsiveness of the poets to current events. As a result, the Grand Prix went to the team of the laureate of the “Poet” award Maxim Amelin and the United Humanitarian Publishing House – a three-volume anthology “Modern literature of the CIS countries. “Poetry”, “Prose”, “Children’s Literature”. Three solid volumes give a thorough cut of the literature of the post-Soviet space, so the decision of the jury should be recognized as Solomon.

In a situation where 900 books were submitted for the competition from all over Russia, including from distant corners, and 46 were shortlisted, it was not easy to determine the best – therefore, in some nominations there were several envelopes with names. “Three nominees, two winners, one sits, sad,” Vladimir Ilyich Tolstoy, an adviser to Putin, joked about this.

So, the prize for “Prose of the Year” went to Alexander Melikhov for his novel “The Sapphire Albatross”. The “Poetry of the Year” award was given to the anthology of Donbass authors “The Great Checkpoint” (which included works by “indigenous” writers of the DPR and LPR created after 2014). In the children’s and teenage nominations “Children of the 21st Century” and “Generation Next”, the jury noted the books “Chess Fled” by Valentina Degteva and “White Dove, Black Elephant” by Eva Nemesh.

And the most emotional moment was the presentation of the prize in the nomination “HUMANITAS”. Rewarding 90-year-old Boris Messerer for the collection of essays “Life passes into memory. Artist about Artists” caused a ten-minute standing ovation. By the way, the outstanding theater figure “shared” the prize for the humanity of his literary work with Mikhail Seslavinsky, the compiler of the album “The Book World of Alexander Benois: Etudes of a Researcher and Collector”.

No less interesting and significant were the books that won in the nominations “Non-fiction”, “Art-book”, “Art of typography”, “Electronic publications and audio books”, as well as “Cultural code”.