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Elena Kostioutchenko remporte le Pushkin House Book Prize 2024

Photo credit: Rocio Chacon

Elena Kostioutchenko s’est vu décerner le Pushkin House Book Prize 2024, qui lui a été remis à Londres le 14 juin dernier en présence de l’une de ses traductrices et de son éditeur britannique.

La Pushkin House est un espace artistique, culturel et social situé à Londres qui explore, remet en question et débat de la culture et de l’identité russes aujourd’hui. Le Pushkin House Book Prize a été créé en 2013 afin de récompenser et d’attirer l’attention sur les ouvrages de non-fiction provenant de Russie ou portant sur ce pays, écrits ou traduits en anglais. Les sujets des livres sélectionnés ne concernent pas seulement la vie et la culture à l’intérieur des frontières de l’actuelle Fédération de Russie, mais aussi l’expérience de ceux dont les terres natales ont été affectées par l’Empire russe et l’Union soviétique.

Les éditions Noir sur blanc ont publié l’édition française, intitulée RUSSIE, MON PAYS BIEN-AIME, en février 2024 dans une traduction d’Emma Lavigne et Anne-Marie Tatsis-Botton.

« Être journaliste, c’est dire la vérité. Avec Mon pays bien-aimé, Elena Kostioutchenko documente son pays, tel qu’il est vécu par celles et ceux qu’il efface systématiquement, par exemple les filles de la campagne recrutées comme travailleuses du sexe, les personnes queer des provinces éloignées, les patientes et les médecins d’une maternité ukrainienne – et les journalistes, dont elle fait partie.
Cet ouvrage est le portrait singulier d’une nation, et celui d’une jeune femme qui refuse de garder le silence. En mars 2022, alors qu’elle est reporter pour Novaïa Gazeta, l’un des derniers journaux russes indépendants, Kostioutchenko se rend en Ukraine pour couvrir la guerre. Elle se donne pour mission d’informer les Russes sur les horreurs que Poutine commet en leur nom. Elle sait dès le début que si elle retourne dans son pays, elle risque d’être condamnée à quinze ans de prison, sinon pire. Portée par la conviction que la plus grande forme d’amour et de patriotisme est la critique, elle continue à écrire, nullement découragée, les yeux grand ouverts. »

LAST TO EAT, LAST TO LEARN de Pashtana Durrani

From young Afghani activist and Amnesty International Global Youth Ambassador Pashtana Durrani, a deeply inspiring memoir about the power of learning and the value of educators in their many forms – from teachers, mentors, and role models, to fathers, mothers, and any one of us with the drive to stand against ignorance.

LAST TO EAT, LAST TO LEARN
My Life in Afghanistan Fighting to Educate Women
by Pashtana Durrani, with Tamara Bralo
Kensington, March 2024
(via The Martell Agency)

LAST TO EAT, LAST TO LEARN is the remarkable memoir of Pashtana Durrani, a 23-year-old Afghan woman, who has pursued her passion for educating the “disappearing girls” of the remote, contested rural tribal regions, amidst all the turmoil, violence and oppression that has enveloped her country – and her family — over a generation.

Pashtana Durrani was the first recipient of a grant from Malala’s Fund, and the founder of Learn NGO, an organization that was ruthlessly targeted by the Taliban. She conceived and developed a brilliant program for getting educational materials directly into the hands of girls and young women in the form of solar-powered tablets preloaded with lessons for grades K-12.

Pashtana escaped from Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover and will soon be in the U.S., with a two-year residency at Wellesley College to continue her critical work for girls’ education. Malala wrote one of two letters to the U.S. government to petition for Pashatana’s safe evacuation to the U.S. Pashtana is a highly sought-after expert in the on-going international advocacy struggles, a figure of hope and promise for all those determined not to cede ground in the battle for women’s education and autonomy in Afghanistan and beyond.

Tamara Bralo is an award-winning journalist who worked for BBC, CNN, and Al Jazeera English, and spent years covering war zones around the world, including Iraq, Libya, and Syria.

SEARCHES de Vauhini Vara

From the author of The Immortal King Rao, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize,a personal exploration of how technology companies have both fulfilled and exploited the human desire for understanding and connection.

SEARCHES
by Vauhini Vara
Pantheon, April 2025
(via Writers House)

When it was released to the public in November 2022, ChatGPT awakened the world to a secretive project: teaching AI-powered machines to write. Its creators had a sweeping ambition—to build machines that could not only communicate, but could do all kinds of other activities, better than humans ever could. But was this goal actually achievable? And if reached, would it lead to our liberation or our subjugation?

Vauhini Vara, an award-winning tech journalist and editor, had long been grappling with these questions. In 2021, she asked a predecessor of ChatGPT to write about her sister’s death, resulting in an essay that was both more moving and more disturbing than she could have imagined. It quickly went viral.

The experience, revealing both the power and the danger of corporate-owned technologies, forced Vara to interrogate how these technologies have influenced her understanding of herself and the world around her, from discovering online chat rooms as a preteen, to using social media as the Wall Street Journal’s first Facebook reporter, to asking ChatGPT for writing advice. Interspersed throughout this investigation are her own Google searches, Amazon reviews, and the other raw material of internet life—including the viral AI experiment that started it all. SEARCHES illuminates how technological capitalism is both shaping and exploiting human existence, while proposing that by harnessing the collective creativity that makes humans unique, we might imagine a freer, more empowered relationship with our machines and, ultimately, with one another.

“Vara’s essays are beautifully written and profoundly researched, but what sets them apart is their profound vulnerability. Her use of experimental forms . . . pushes the limits of the genre without ever compromising her circumspective, confessional approach. An original essay collection about loss, technology, morality, and identity.” —Kirkus, starred

“SEARCHES picks up where Vauhini Vara’s impressive first novel, The Immortal King Rao, left off; this new book deepens, complicates, and amplifies her ongoing investigation into the nature of artificial intelligence, especially in relationship to the human body, mortality, sorrow, and grief. Blessedly free of cant or posture and extremely knowledgeable about (and acutely conscious of its complicity in) the networks it’s mapping, Searches is Vara’s best and most compelling book yet.” —David Shields, author of Reality Hunger

“I cannot imagine a better guide through the infuriating, labyrinthine underworld of technology than Vauhini Vara. SEARCHES is so many things—heart-stoppingly sad, a formal high-wire act, a wise and funny and thoughtful encyclopedia of our modern age—but most of all it is a book about human relationships: how imperfectly we made this thing that connects us, and how we might use this thing to re-meet ourselves and each other.” —Carmen Maria Machado

Vauhini Vara is the author of This is Salvaged, named a notable book of 2023 by Publisher’s Weekly, The New Yorker and others, and The Immortal King Rao, a Pulitzer Prize finalist. She is also a journalist, writing for Wired and others, and an editor, most recently at The New York Times Magazine.

MELTDOWN de Duncan Mavin

MELTDOWN charts the incredible inside story of a once venerable Swiss bank that produced a conveyor belt of financial scandals and whose collapse reveals the amorality at the heart of the global banking system.

MELTDOWN
The Collapse of Credit Suisse
by Duncan Mavin
Pan Macmillan, September 2024
(via Northbank Talent Management)

It’s an international tale that takes us from Mozambique to Australia, from Hong Kong to New York, and of course, inside the hushed, marble corridors of Zurich’s banking elite.

Mavin is uniquely sourced to tell the story of Credit Suisse’s scandal-ridden demise, with dozens of inside-the-room contacts that can spill exclusive details about the bank onto the page. The bank’s collapse has been the biggest shock to the financial system since the financial crisis, sparking a media frenzy. But only Duncan has access to key sources within the bank’s executive suite and inner circle that will bring this critical, rollicking story to life.

Duncan Mavin is a seasoned international financial journalist and author of the critically acclaimed The Pyramid of Lies: Lex Greensill and the Multi-Billion Dollar Scandal. Since 2009, he has been a reporter, editor and now columnist for Dow Jones publications including the Wall Street Journal, based in Hong Kong, London and New York. His writing has also appeared in Barron’s, Financial News and on Bloomberg News. He lives with his wife and three sons in the UK.

GOING NUCLEAR de Tim Gregory

In this provocative, timely and well researched book, nuclear chemist Tim Gregory argues our species’ very survival hinges on whether we choose to unleash the potential of the atom and embrace a nuclear future.

GOING NUCLEAR
How the Atom Will Save the World
by Tim Gregory
The Bodley Head (Penguin), 2025
(via Northbank Talent Management)

GOING NUCLEAR will be an exploration of the immense power in the centre of the atom, the areas of our world that it touches, and the potential it has to solve the biggest problems our species faces. The book retraces our relationship with nuclear through the Nuclear Revolution of the early 20th century and look towards the Nuclear Renaissance that could — and should — ensue over the coming decades. Gregory argues convincingly that there is no net zero without nuclear power.

By interweaving science, policy and environmentalism, Going Nuclear will explore the potential of the atom not only for nuclear power but also clean energy production, nuclear medicine, nuclear forensics, interplanetary exploration and atomic farming.

Tim Gregory is a a nuclear chemist for the National Nuclear Laboratory in the heart of the British nuclear industry. His academic background is in geology, planetary science, and isotope cosmochemistry, and he holds a PhD in the latter. He is also a speaker, presenter and is the author of Meteorite: How Stones from Outer Space Made our World.