Book prizes

The Big Book Prize is an annual literary award for the best book of any genre written in Russian. It is the largest literary award in Russia and the former soviet countries and is the second largest literary award in the world in terms of prize money just falling behind the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Debut is an independent literary prize established in 2000 by Andrei Skoch’s Humanitarian Fund called ‘Generation’. It is awarded annually to young authors who are 35 or younger and submissions have to be in the Russian language. It is open to all, irrespective of their country of residence.

The Illuminer Prize was established in 2008 by Dmitry Zimin, the founder and Honorary President of VimpelCom, and his non-profit Foundation called Dynasty. The aim of the Prize is to increase readership of non-fiction, especially of books on popular science, as well as to encourage authors who wish to popularize ideas in the scientific community.

National Bestseller is the annual Russian literary prize awarded in the town of St. Petersburg for the best novel written in Russian within any one calendar year. The award was established in 2001 by Victor Toporov, the Russian writer, translator, and literary critic. The motto of the prize is “To awake the famous!”

The NOS annual literature prize was founded in 2009 by the Mikhail Prokhorov Charitable Foundation to locate and support new trends in contemporary Russian fiction. The prize is being incorporated in the major Foundation’s educational programme; this is called the ‘World of Books’.

The Russian Booker Prize is an annual literary award for the best novel written in the Russian language and published in the previous year. It retains the reputation as being one of the most prestigious literary awards in the country and aims to promote quality prose and commercial success.