Please join us for the first author event of the Pushkin House Book Prize 2024, where Tom Parfitt will discuss his shortlisted book High Caucasus: A Mountain Quest in Russia’s Haunted Hinterland, with Luke Harding.
On 1 September 2004, Chechen and Ingush militants took more than a thousand people captive at a school in the North Caucasus region of southern Russia. Working as a correspondent, Tom Parfitt witnessed the tragedy of the Beslan siege in which hundreds of hostages died, more than half of them children. The experience left Tom emotionally shredded, struggling to find a way to return to his life in Moscow and put to rest the ghosts of the Beslan siege.
Having long been fascinated by the mountainous North Caucasus, Tom turned to his love of walking as a source of both recuperation and discovery. He embarked on a thousand-mile walk across seven Russian republics, from Sochi on the Black Sea to the ancient fortress city of Derbent on the Caspian. Through bear-haunted forests, across high altitude pastures and over the shoulders of Elbrus, Europe’s highest mountain, he found companionship and respite. In High Caucasus he shares the stories of the resilient, hospitable and fascinating people he met along the way, offering a unique view into a troubled yet exquisite corner of the world.
As he traverses political, religious and ethnic faultlines, Tom examines the centuries of Russian imperialism that lie at the roots of the region’s conflict and addresses xenophobic attitudes towards North Caucasian nationalities that still persist in Russia today. Although Tom finished his walk several years ago, his observations of Russia’s presence in the region – from installing dictatorships to silencing journalists, human rights activists and ordinary people who speak out against oppression – assume a new importance in light of the war in Ukraine.
Read the Q&A with Tom Parfitt about his book and research here.
After studying Russian politics and language at SSEES, UCL, Tom Parfitt lived and worked as a journalist in Russia for twenty years. He was a correspondent for The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and The Times and frequently reported on Chechnya and the wider North Caucasus.
In 2008, Parfitt received the Royal Geographical Society’s Neville Shulman Award to complete a one thousand mile walk across the Greater Caucasus mountains – the journey which forms the backbone of High Caucasus. In 2009 he was a Knight Wallace Journalism Fellow at the University of Michigan studying the role of international diplomacy in Georgia's breakaway regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. In 2010 he was a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC, where he researched Islamist insurgency in the North Caucasus.
In 2022, Parfitt began a PhD in Creative Non-Fiction at Bath Spa University. His writing will examine the impact of the climate crisis and other environmental threats on the worldwide boreal forest and its inhabitants, both human and non-human.
Luke Harding is a journalist, writer and award-winning foreign correspondent with The Guardian. He has reported from Delhi, Berlin and Moscow, covered wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, and since February 2022 he has spent a significant time reporting from Ukraine. Between 2007 and 2011 he was The Guardian’s Moscow bureau chief, and in February 2011 the Kremlin deported him from the country in the first case of its kind since the Cold War. Harding has written a number of books about the political system under Putin, including Mafia State: How One Reporter Became An Enemy Of The Brutal New Russia (2011) and Shadow State: Murder, Mayhem and Russia's Remaking of the West (2020), and his latest book, Invasion: Russia’s Bloody War and Ukraine’s Fight for Survival, was published in 2023.
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