Maria Stepanova longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize 2021
News08.09.2021
We are delighted to announce that Maria Stepanova has been nominated for the Baillie Gifford Prize for In Memory of Memory.
The Baillie Gifford Prize is widely regarded as the most prestigious non-fiction prize in the United Kingdom. Its longlist, shortlist and winner are chosen each year by a panel of independent judges and the award is endowed with a prize sum of £50,000. Previous recipients include Margaret MacMillan, David France and Helen Macdonald. In Memory of Memory was also shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize.
More on the multi-award-winning work:
Montpellier, 1908: the photograph of a young woman by an easel or »Grandma on the barricades«, as the family calls it. Pre-Revolution portraits, postcards from Venice, Montpellier, or Nizhny Novgorod, pieces from the »library of a very different and lost visual culture«, letters, childhood souvenirs – these are the things that the author examines in astonishment. Who were these people who travelled all throughout Europe yet lived in Russia? Who did their best to remain anonymous and who made little effort to make history seem interesting? But it is precisely the unspectacular nature of the find which turns the author’s research in the Russian context into something new: »Everyone else had a family made up of people participating in history; mine was made up only of their tenants.« Destined to become victims of persecution and repression, they all still managed to survive the 20th century. How was that possible? This is the question and point of departure for Maria Stepanova’s first great work of prose.
»[A] daring combination of family history and roving cultural analysis [...]
a kaleidoscopic, time-shuffling look at one family of Russian Jews throughout a fiercely eventful century.«
John Williams, The New York Times
»Stepanova’s companionable prose balances high seriousness with self-ironizing deadpan humour.
Without pretension, she erects her house of memory in the neighbourhood of Marcel Proust, Vladimir Nabokov and Sebald.«
Rachel Polonsky, TLS
The Baillie Gifford Prize is widely regarded as the most prestigious non-fiction prize in the United Kingdom. Its longlist, shortlist and winner are chosen each year by a panel of independent judges and the award is endowed with a prize sum of £50,000. Previous recipients include Margaret MacMillan, David France and Helen Macdonald. In Memory of Memory was also shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize.
More on the multi-award-winning work:
Montpellier, 1908: the photograph of a young woman by an easel or »Grandma on the barricades«, as the family calls it. Pre-Revolution portraits, postcards from Venice, Montpellier, or Nizhny Novgorod, pieces from the »library of a very different and lost visual culture«, letters, childhood souvenirs – these are the things that the author examines in astonishment. Who were these people who travelled all throughout Europe yet lived in Russia? Who did their best to remain anonymous and who made little effort to make history seem interesting? But it is precisely the unspectacular nature of the find which turns the author’s research in the Russian context into something new: »Everyone else had a family made up of people participating in history; mine was made up only of their tenants.« Destined to become victims of persecution and repression, they all still managed to survive the 20th century. How was that possible? This is the question and point of departure for Maria Stepanova’s first great work of prose.
»[A] daring combination of family history and roving cultural analysis [...]
a kaleidoscopic, time-shuffling look at one family of Russian Jews throughout a fiercely eventful century.«
John Williams, The New York Times
»Stepanova’s companionable prose balances high seriousness with self-ironizing deadpan humour.
Without pretension, she erects her house of memory in the neighbourhood of Marcel Proust, Vladimir Nabokov and Sebald.«
Rachel Polonsky, TLS
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Zuletzt aktualisiert am 08.09.2021