The Read Russia Prize awards are made every two years for outstanding translations of Russian literature into foreign languages.
Established in 2011 by the Institute for Literary Translation, the awards are supported by the Federal Agency for Press and Mass Communication (Rospechat’) and the Boris N. Yeltsin Presidential Center. They are awarded to a translator (or group of translators) for works published in translation by a foreign publisher during the previous two years. There are four categories of awards. The winner(s) receive an award of up to $10,000, divided between the translator(s) of the work and the publishing house(s).
Jury: Kevin M. F. Platt, Donald Rayfield and Anna Summers
Jury: Bryan Karetnyk, Muireann Maguire and Anastasia Tolstoy. [10]
Shortlist:
Winner: Antony Wood's translation of Alexander Pushkin's Selected Poetry (Penguin Random House) [11]
Special Mention: Robert and Elizabeth Chandler's translation of Vasily Grossman's Stalingrad (Harvill Secker and New York Review Books) [11]
Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was a Russian poet, playwright, and novelist of the Romantic era. He is considered by many to be the greatest Russian poet, as well as the founder of modern Russian literature.
Russian literature refers to the literature of Russia and its émigrés and to Russian-language literature. The roots of Russian literature can be traced to the Middle Ages, when epics and chronicles in Old East Slavic were composed. By the Age of Enlightenment, literature had grown in importance, and from the early 1830s, Russian literature underwent an astounding golden age in poetry, prose and drama. Romanticism permitted a flowering of poetic talent: Vasily Zhukovsky and later his protégé Alexander Pushkin came to the fore. Prose was flourishing as well. Mikhail Lermontov was one of the most important poets and novelists. The first great Russian novelist was Nikolai Gogol. Then came Ivan Turgenev, who mastered both short stories and novels. Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy soon became internationally renowned. Other important figures of Russian realism were Ivan Goncharov, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin and Nikolai Leskov. In the second half of the century Anton Chekhov excelled in short stories and became a leading dramatist. The beginning of the 20th century ranks as the Silver Age of Russian poetry. The poets most often associated with the "Silver Age" are Konstantin Balmont, Valery Bryusov, Alexander Blok, Anna Akhmatova, Nikolay Gumilyov, Sergei Yesenin, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Marina Tsvetaeva. This era produced some first-rate novelists and short-story writers, such as Aleksandr Kuprin and Nobel Prize winners Ivan Bunin, Leonid Andreyev, Fyodor Sologub, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Alexander Belyaev, Andrei Bely and Maxim Gorky.
Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin was the first Russian writer awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was noted for the strict artistry with which he carried on the classical Russian traditions in the writing of prose and poetry. The texture of his poems and stories, sometimes referred to as "Bunin brocade", is considered to be one of the richest in the language.
Tatyana Nikitichna Tolstaya is a Russian writer, TV host, publicist, novelist, and essayist from the Tolstoy family.
Donald Michael Thomas was a British poet, translator, novelist, editor, biographer and playwright. His work has been translated into 30 languages.
Nadezhda Alexandrovna Teffi was a Russian humorist writer. Together with Arkady Averchenko she was one of the prominent authors of the magazine Novyi Satirikon.
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky are literary translators best known for their collaborative English translations of classic Russian literature. Individually, Pevear has also translated into English works from French, Italian, and Greek. The couple's collaborative translations have been nominated three times and twice won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize. Their translation of Dostoevsky's The Idiot also won the first Efim Etkind Translation Prize.
Len Rix is a Zimbabwe-born translator of Hungarian literature into English, noted for his translations of Antal Szerb's Journey by Moonlight and The Pendragon Legend and of Magda Szabó's The Door and Katalin Street.
The Rossica Translation Prize is a biennial award given to an exceptional published translation of a literary work from Russian into English. It is the only prize in the world for Russian to English literary translations.
Mikhail Leonovich Gasparov was a Russian philologist and translator, renowned for his studies in classical philology and the history of versification, and a member of the informal Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School. He graduated from Moscow State University in 1957 and worked at the Gorky Institute of World Literature, the Russian State University for the Humanities, and the Russian Language Institute in Moscow. In 1992 Gasparov was elected a full member of the Russian Academy of Science.
Semyon Izrailevich Lipkin was a Russian writer, poet, and literary translator.
Robert Chandler is a British poet and literary translator. He is the editor of Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida (Penguin) and the author of the short biography of Alexander Pushkin (Hesperus). He is also the editor of the literary magazine Cardinal Points.
Mary Hobson (1926–2020) was a British writer, poet and translator. She wrote four novels and an autobiography. She translated Alexander Griboedov's Woe from Wit and his letters. Hobson also translated works by Alexander Pushkin. She won the Griboedov Prize and Pushkin Medal.
The Yasnaya Polyana Literary Award is an annual all-Russian literary award that was founded in 2003 by the Leo Tolstoy Museum Estate and Samsung Electronics. The award is presented for the best traditional-style novel written in Russian or translated into Russian.
Julian Henry Lowenfeld is an American-Russian poet, playwright, trial lawyer, composer, and prize-winning translator, best known for his translations of Alexander Pushkin's poetry into English.
Nikita Alexeyevich Struve was a French author and translator of Russian descent, specializing in the study of Russian émigrés.
Maxim Albertovich Amelin is a Russian poet, critic, essayist, editor, and translator. He was born in Kursk, Russia, where he graduated from the Kursk Commercial College and did his military service in the Soviet Army. He studied in the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow from 1991 to 1994, where he worked with Olesya Nikolayeva. He was commercial director and director of the St. Petersburg publishing house Symposium from 1995 to 2007 and has been the Editor-in-Chief of the Moscow publishing house OGI since 2008. He is married to the poet Anna Zolotaryova and lives in Moscow.
Vladimir Arkadyevich Gandelsman is a Russian poet and translator.
Boris Dralyuk is a Ukrainian-American writer, editor and translator. He obtained his high school degree from Fairfax High School and his PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from UCLA. He teaches in the English Department at the University of Tulsa. He has taught Russian literature at his alma mater and at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. From 2016 to 2022, he was executive editor and editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books and he is the managing editor of Cardinal Points.