Winner of Pushkin House Book Prize 2026 – Sophie Pinkham's The Oak and the Larch: A Forest History of Russia and its Empires

We are delighted to announce that Sophie Pinkham, a writer specialising in Soviet and post-Soviet, socialist and post-socialist culture and Professor of Practice in the Comparative Literature Department at Cornell University, has just won the annual Pushkin House Book Prize for The Oak and the Larch: A Forest History of Russia and its Empires (William Collins, 2026).

The Oak and the Larch is the first English-language account of Russia’s forests to explore them through both environmental and cultural lenses.With one-fifth of the world’s trees growing within Russia’s borders, they have been both witness and an inseparable part of the country’s course through history, from their role in the lives of Indigenous Siberian societies that existed in symbiosis with the forest to medieval societies and the Soviet period. The book is a tribute to a pivotal natural factor that became so symbolic, and yet overlooked, in Russia’s political and cultural history.

You can read the Q&A with Sophie about her winning book here.

Sir Laurie Bristow KCMG, President of Hughes Hall, University of Cambridge, and chair of the Book Prize judging panel, said: “Sophie Pinkham’s work is remarkable for its originality and the way it brings environmental and cultural perspectives together to offer a fresh way of thinking about Russia’s past and present. She moves with remarkable breadth between history and literature, ideology and folk culture, empire and climate change, while remaining attentive to the human experience of the vast forests at the heart of the book. It is an exceptionally well-written, poetic and thoughtful exploration of some of the enduring questions of society, power and identity.”