Russian Booker Prize


The Russian Booker Prize was a Russian literary award modeled after the Man Booker Prize. It was awarded from 1992 to 2017. It was inaugurated by English Chief Executive Sir Michael Harris Caine. It was awarded each year to the best work of fiction, written in the Russian language, as decided by a panel of judges, irrespective of the writer's citizenship., the chair of the Russian Booker Prize Committee was British journalist George Walden. The prize was the first Russian non-governmental literary award since the country's 1917 Revolution.
Each year, a jury choose a short list of the six best novels up for nomination from a "long list" of nominees. Initially, the winner received £10,000, roughly 48,000 RUB or $16,000. This was increased to 600,000 rubles in 2011, roughly $20,000, while each of the short listed finalists earned $2,000. The criteria for inclusion included literary effort, representativeness of the contemporary literary genres and the author's reputation as a writer. Length was not a criterion, as books with between 40 and 60 pages had been nominated. From 1997 to 2001, the award was renamed the Smirnoff–Booker Literary Prize, in honour of entrepreneur and Smirnoff founder Pyotr Smirnov. From 2002 to 2005, Open Russia NGO was the general sponsor of the Booker Literary Prize in Russia, leading to its name change to the Booker–Open Russia Literary Prize during that time. Before the announcement of the 2005 winner, the Booker Foundation decided to end its partnership with Open Russia after the foundation's chairman, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was sentenced to nine years in prison for tax evasion. In 2005, the committee signed a five-year contract with London-based BP. In 2010, the prize ran into funding problems and preparations for the 2010 prize were suspended because no new sponsor could be found. Since 2011 new sponsor is Russian Telecom Equipment Company.
In 2011, a "novel of the decade" was chosen due to lack of sponsorship to hold the customary award. Five finalists were chosen from sixty nominees selected from the prize's past winners and finalists since 2001. Chudakov won posthumously with A Gloom Is Cast Upon the Ancient Steps, which takes place in a fictional town in Kazakhstan and describes life under Stalinist Russia. Lyudmila Ulitskaya holds the record for most nominations, followed by Andrei Dmitriev and Alexey Slapovsky. No person has won the award more than once.
On September 19, 2019 Foundation Board and the Аward committee of the Russian Booker Prize officially announced the termination of the award. However, the Russian Booker Fund was not closed, "leaving the opportunity for the renewal of the award".

Winners and nominees

1990s

* Winners
YearAuthorWorkRef.
*Lines of Fate
Place
Monogram
Manhole
The Time Night
Four Stout Hearts
*Baize-covered Table with Decanter
The Cursed and the Slain
Sign of the Beast
Notes of a Lodger
Sonechka
*The Show is Over
Skunk: A Life
Don Domino
Third World
Total Indecency
The First Second Coming
*The General and His Army
A Barracks Tale
The Odyssey
*The Stamp Album
Vladimir Chigrintsev
The Will to be Alive
Turn in the River
Back to the USSR
, A Novel About Education
*Cell
The Forty Years of Changzhoeh
I Love
A Dragonfly Enlarged to the Size of a Dog
Medea and Her Children
Round Dance
*Strange Letters
Passing of the Shadow
Bga
Questionnaire
Не много ли для одной
*Freedom
The Prussian Bride
My Marusechka
The Prizelist
The Underground, or a Hero of Our Time
A Coast

2000s

* Winners
YearAuthorWorkRef.
*The Conquest of Izmail
The Last Communist
The Funeral of a Grasshopper
Lunch
Money Day
Roses and Chrysanthemums
*The Kukotsky Case
Sir
The Lady of History
Slynx
Wreath for the Grave of the Wind
A Gloom Is Cast Upon the Ancient Steps
*Karaganda Ninth-Day Requiem or The Story of the Last Days
Fritz Syndrome
The Love of Kinfolks Laid to Rest
Treatment by Electricity: Novel of 84 Fragments from the East and 74 Fragments from the West
Ice
*White on Black
Renaud's Residence
Jupiter
Frau Scar
Laura
Kazaroza
*Voltairiens and Voltairiennes
Sergeyev and the Town
The Sun was Shining
Shilkloper's Horn
Number One or in the Gardens of other Opportunities
Quality of Life
*Without Way or Track
Little Romance
Canvas
Kablukov
Bonanza
Except for Lavrikov
A Criminal
*2017
Sanka
On the Sunny Side of the Street
Jerusalem
Villa Belle Letra
A Fish
*Matisse
Bay of Joy
The End of a Needle
The Man Who Knew Everything
God Does Not Play With Dice
Daniel Stein, Translator
*Librarian
Be as Little Children
Armada
Schukinsk and Other Places
Grafomanka
Crack
*The Time of Women
Eltyshevy
Stone Bridge
Yesterday's Eternity
Once Upon a Time an Old Man and Old Woman
Cranes and Dwarfs

2010s

* Winners
YearAuthorWorkRef.
*The Flower Cross
Happiness is Possible
A Journey of Hanuman on Lolland
The House, In Which...
Shali Raid
Klotsvog
*A Gloom Is Cast Upon the Ancient Steps
Karaganda Ninth-Day Requiem or The Story of the Last Days
Sanka
Eltyshevy
Daniel Stein, Translator
*The Peasant and the Teenager
Khadija, Notes of a Death Girl
Arbeit, Or A Wide Canvas
Light Head
The Women of Lazarus
The Germans
Возвращение в Панджруд
Возвращение в Египет
Vera
Bride and Groom
The Lullaby
Among People
Flood Zone
Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes
Крепость
Убить Бобрыкина. История одного убийства

Criticism

The Russian Booker was famous for unpredictable and paradoxical decisions that did not always attract the approval of Russian literary experts.
A number of writers expressed their fundamental rejection of the "Russian Booker". Already the first decision of the jury, as a result of which the award in 1992 was not received by the generally recognized favorite — the novel "The Time Night" by Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, met with almost unanimous disapproval. Vladimir Novikov in 2000, describing the very first Booker prize winner - the novel "Lines of fate, or the chest of Milashevich" by Mark Kharitonov as boring, stated: "From the very beginning, the Booker plot did not succeed, it was failed to nominate a leader through the award, which modern prose writers would passionately want to catch up and overtake. But it is precisely in this the cultural function, the cultural strategy of any literary prize" Elena Fanaylova noted in 2006: "The Russian Booker does not correspond to its English parent either from a moral or from a meaningful point of view. The prize focuses on literature that is not interesting either on the domestic or foreign market, or, if it is a convertible author, it is awarded not for 'novel of the year', but 'for merits'." Yuri Polyakov in 2008 pointed out that "people receive awards not for the quality of a literary text, not for some artistic discovery, not for the ability to reach the reader, but for loyalty to a certain party, mainly experimental-liberal direction. Almost all the books that were awarded with the prize, did not have any serious reader's fate, received the award and were immediately completely forgotten." Dmitry Bykov in 2010 noted the Booker jury's "amazing ability to choose the worst or, in any case, the least significant of six novels".
Literary criticist Konstantin Trunin, describing the 2018 crisis of the award, noted: "For all the time of its existence, the prize did not justify itself, each year choosing the winner as a writer who created work that is far from understanding by Russian people of the reality surrounding him. There was a direct propaganda of Western values, not Russian ones. Or on the contrary, the West was shown literature that was not destined to create a close resemblance to the works created in Russia during the XIX century. And it is not surprising that year after year, the Russian Booker lost its authority among the emerging awards. Being handed twenty-six times, he faced the rejection of sponsors, as a result of which it became necessary to reconsider the meaning of existence, having found the transformation required by the reader to a truly Russian humanistic value system».