Elena Kostyuchenko, the journalist, writer and activist, has just won the annual Pushkin House Book Prize for I Love Russia: Reporting from a Lost Country, translated  by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse and Bela Shayevich (The Bodley Head, 2023).  

I Love Russia draws on Kostyuchenko’s 17-year career writing for Novaya Gazeta, witnessing  the deterioration of Russian politics and its consequences for society. She documents  Russia as experienced by those it systematically and brutally oppresses, and whose voices  are rarely heard, including the LGBTQ+ community in the outer provinces, patients and  doctors at a Ukrainian maternity ward, Indigenous communities in the Far North, and activists  and journalists like herself. Inspired to become a journalist by the work of Anna Politkovskaya,  Kostyuchenko has faced the consequences of her brave reporting. She is driven by the  conviction that the greatest form of patriotism is uncompromising and compassionate  honesty about one’s homeland.  

You can read the Q&A with Elena Kostyuchenko about her book here.

Photo credit: Rocio Chacon