‘The Last Empire’ wins third Pushkin House Russian Book Prize

The Last Empire by Serhii Plokhy was declared the winner of the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize 2015 on 18th May. Lord Browne of Madingley, chair of the judges, announced the decision at a ceremony at Pushkin House, the main centre for Russian culture in London.

The Last Empire: The final days of the Soviet Union (Oneworld) was in competition with five other books published last year, written by authors from the UK, Ukraine, Poland, the US and the Netherlands.

Lord Browne, the businessman and chair of the Tate Galleries, said: “We have found a worthy winner in Serhii Plokhy. He has brought to life events that are of great relevance to our understanding of the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The book is beautifully written, well researched and above all engaging. It is a book that is hard to put down and one that readers will find themselves returning to again and again.”

The Pushkin House Russian Book Prize, in association with Waterstones and now in its third year, rewards the best non-fiction writing on Russia and was established to encourage public understanding and intelligent debate about the Russian-speaking world.

Bridget Kendall, the BBC diplomatic correspondent and a member of the jury, said: “This is a fascinating and easily accessible read, both for those who know little about this period, and for those who know a lot. It is well structured, with a compelling narrative divided into clear chapters. It is easy to pick up and hard to put down.”

~

On Christmas Day 1991 Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as president of the Soviet Union. By the next day, the USSR was officially no more and the USA had emerged as the world’s sole superpower. Serhii Plokhy presents an account of the preceding five months of drama, filled with failed coups d’état and political intrigue. Homing in on this previously disregarded but crucial period and using recently declassified documents and original interviews with key participants, he shatters the established myths of 1991 and presents a bold new interpretation of the Soviet Union’s final months. Plokhy argues that contrary to the triumphalist Western narrative, George H. W. Bush desperately wanted to preserve the Soviet Union and keep Gorbachev in power, and that it was Ukraine and not the US that played the key role in the collapse. The consequences of those five months and the myth-making that has since surrounded them are still being felt in, Russia, Ukraine, the US and Europe today.

~

Serhii Plokhy is the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History and Director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. A leading authority on Eastern Europe, he has lived and taught in Ukraine, Canada, and the United States. He has published extensively in English, Ukrainian, and Russian. For three successive years (2002-2005) his books won first prize of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies.

Read an extract of Hitler’s Last Day: Minute by Minute

An extract of Jonathan Mayo and Emma Craigie’s new book, Hitler’s Last Day: Minute by Minute is now available to read online at The Daily Mail website.

Detailing ‘a day of endings and beginnings when ordinary people were placed often in extraordinary situations’, the novel follows the BBC 2 live documentary Titanic: Minute by Minute.

You can find out more about Hitler’s Last Day: Minute by Minute here.

Colm Tóibín to make festival appearances with eighth novel Nora Webster

Colm Tóibín will be touring the UK 19th – 23th May to talk about  his new novel Nora Webster.

He will be appearing at Hay, Charleston, Cambridge, Bristol, Bath and London. For more details, see our events page.

Obama’s special adviser, David Axelrod, publishes his highly anticipated memoir, BELIEVER

PR Collective is delighted to announce the UK publication of BELIEVER: My Forty Years in Politics by one of the most influential political heavyweights of recent years. As a child hearing John F. Kennedy speak in New York or as a strategist guiding the first African-American to the White House, Axelrod shows how his personal story stands at the centre of the tumultuous American century.

Last Drink to LA author John Sutherland talks about his relationship with alcohol in The Times

‘Alcoholism turned the writer and academic into a bore and cost him his marriage. But, he says, sobering up cost him too.’

PR Collective is delighted that Tuesday’s issue of The Times includes ‘some thinking about drinking’ from one of our authors, John Sutherland. The article, an extract from Sutherland’s Alcohol Anonymous classic Last Drink to LA is available to read in full online here for those with subscriptions to The Times online.

Read more about John Sutherland’s ‘part reportage, part confession’ which is “one of the freshest, best written and funniest confessional memoirs” here. The book is out now, published by Short Books.

PR Collective delighted to announce Brooke Shields’ follow up to her bestselling debut, There Was a Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me

PR Collective will represent actor Brooke Shields’ upcoming novel, a memoir focusing on her challenging and changeable relationship with her mother Teri Brooke.

Published this week, There Was a Little Girl tells the story of Shields’ childhood in her own words, and is the much-anticipated follow up the New York Times bestseller Down Came the Rain. Teri, often criticised for her role in shining the spotlight on Brooke as a child star, passed away in 2012, where Brooke remained at her side, loving and conflicted until the end.

Previous winner Colm Toíbín nominated for the Costa Novel Award with Nora Webster

We are delighted to share the news that PR Collective author Colm Tóibín has been shortlisted for Costa Book Awards’ Novel of the Year.

The Costa judges found Nora Webster – a deeply human novel which centers around a widow and unlikely heroine in 1960’s Ireland – “a beautiful novel which is a joy and pleasure to read”.

The novel, published in October, is Colm’s eighth. He is no stranger to shortlist success – his novel Brooklyn previously won the Costa Novel Award, whilst his first three novels, The Blackwater Lightship, The Master, and The Testament of Mary were all nominated for the Booker Prize.

The overall winner will be announced on 27th January 2015 and will receive a prize of £30,000, whilst the category winners will each receive £5,000. We wish Colm the best.

PR Collective to launch World Editions

PR Collective are pleased to be working with new imprint World Editions. The inspiring new imprint will launch four remarkable novels in early 2015.

WORLD EDITIONS is a new publishing house being launched by internationally respected Dutch publisher Eric Visser, whose De Geus list in the Netherlands includes celebrated writers such as Alice Munro, Patrick Ness, Henning Mankell, Jonathan Safran Foer and Colm Tóibín. De Geus has published fourteen Nobel Prize winners, five during the last six years.

Like its Dutch sister company, WORLD EDITIONS seeks to distinguish itself by unlocking world literature – fiction, quality crime, non-fiction – from all cultures. De Geus in the Netherlands is well-known for its international and multicultural focus, with translations from 35 languages and authors from over 80 countries.

WORLD EDITIONS aims to stimulate intercultural dialogue by making the most important literary titles available to the greatest possible audience.