Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia by Peter Pomerantsev has won the 2016 RSL Ondaatje Prize, which has an award of £10,000 (about $14,585) and honors "a distinguished work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry, evoking the spirit of a place." The book was published in the U.S. by PublicAffairs.
Kate Adie, one of the judges, called Pomerantsev's book "an exuberant exposure of greed and corruption in modern Russia. The grotesque pursuit of money is conveyed in glittering, trenchant prose, as is a country where gangsters rule and the river of tainted money flows easily to London."
Another judge, Moniza Alvi, said Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible "holds a mirror to Putin's Russia and reflects back the bleakness of a dystopian vision. Written with rare stylistic wit and brilliance, as well as heart, this is an essential as well as a captivating read--a warning, and, implicitly, a prayer for our times."
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Clare Harvey won the £1,000 (about $1,460) Romantic Novelists' Association's Joan Hessayon Award for new writers for her novel The Gunner Girl, the Bookseller reported. RNA chair Eileen Ramsay said the book "is a worthy winner; beautifully written, incredibly well-researched and with a 'can't put this down' quality."
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A shortlist of eight books has been released for the of £2,000 (about $2,920) Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, which "aims to honor the craft of translation, and to recognize its cultural importance." The winner will be named June 11. This year's shortlisted titles are:
Paul Vincent and John Irons for 100 Dutch-Language Poems
John Cullen for Kamel Daoud's The Meursault Investigation
Stephen Pearl for Ivan Goncharov's The Same Old Story
Don Bartlett for Karl Ove Knausgaard's Dancing in the Dark: My Struggle
Shaun Whiteside for Charles Lewinsky's Melnitz
Lola M. Rogers for Sofi Oksanen's When the Doves Disappeared
Philip Roughton for Jón Kalman Stefánsson's The Heart of Man
Lisa C. Hayden for Eugene Vodolazkin's Laurus