ELKOST International literary agency - Ludmila Ulitskaya is awarded 2011 Prix Simone de Beauvoir pour la liberté des femmes

The Simone de Beauvoir Prize is an international human rights prize for women's freedom, awarded to individuals or groups fighting for gender equality and opposing breaches of human rights. It is named after the French author and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir.
The prize is awarded every year to a remarkable personality whose courage and thoughts are examples for everybody, in the spirit of Simone de Beauvoir who wrote: "The ultimate end, for which human beings should aim, is liberty, the only capable [thing], to establish every end on."
The prize was founded on January 9, 2008, the 100th anniversary of de Beauvoir's birth. It is funded by Éditions Gallimard and CulturesFrance.
The current prize committee is composed of approximately 20 internationally known figures, including several writers, sociologists, philosophers, journalists and politicians. Famous philosopher Julia Kristeva is the founder and head of the Simone de Beauvoir prize committee.

Featured titles

Soviet Education, a novel by Olga Medvedkova

Rights sold: France - Alain Baudry & Cie Editeur, Spain - Acantilado

Prix Révélation de la Société des gens de lettres (2014, France)

Summer 1980: Moscow prepares for the Olympics at great risk, in the midst of the war in Afghanistan. The city is closed to non-residents, who in any case are abandoning it. Liza is one of them. An adolescent in search of her
identity, she has gone with her mother to a village she has never been to, but where her mother is very well known. And for good reason: the village bears her name. The mansion, an imposing but dilapidated Italianate building,
belonged to her ancestors, Russian princes close to the tsar. As for Liza, she bears the name of her father: Klein. A father who lives in America and the mere mention of whom is all but forbidden. Liza understands only that she has
a German name, and that she is the descendant, on her father’s side, of Joseph Klein, the Russian translator of Goethe.

Here, suddenly, are too many identities, whose accumulating questions go unanswered. Jewish, aristocratic, Soviet, intellectual – her family is a tissue of contradictions. To crown it all, she is troubled by David, her mother’s friend,
whose house they are living in, and who as she quickly realizes is of Jewish origin, a pillager of memories in the ancestral mansion, an accomplice of the village folk, a disillusioned artist declared a “social parasite” by the
authorities, who collaborates with a film crew that finances its perfectly official films by trafficking in icons...

Medvedkova's novel ideally combines a number of themes and elements which are quite typical for any novel where action is set in Russia, but their mixture produces an unexpected effect. Its protagonist a 15-year-old anorexic girl, a wonder-kid passing throughout a difficult stage of growing up and maturing, confronting the outside world and - especially - her authoritarian mother who herself has many skeletons in her closet.

The novel features the "ordinary family of Soviet intellectuals". Its narrative gains momentum gradually, and that subtly reflects the state of the soul and consciousness of the main character, its internal development: from slow and sleepy, to feverishly sharp, dizzy fast. Up to the very end of the book, Lisa (and the reader) doesn't see the full picture.

The novel is beautifully written, very dynamic and elegant. It's a concentrate of all Russian and Soviet just in the form that Western readership is interested to get. Aristocratic roots of Liza's family, dissidents, Soviet cultural elite, intelligentsia, etc. - in fact, the book provides a descriptive account of formation, way of thinking and self-perception of the modern Russian intellectuals, all these people who now got to play an important role in world science, culture,
politics, and economy.

The book is originally written in French and has around 220 pages.

CASE OF ENGINEER TOWN, 2008

Rights sold: Russia – Chronicler

A nomad city of Karakorum, capital of the Mongol Empire (the map of which is just identical to a map of the Russian Empire), appears suddenly in the beginning of XVIII century in the area of Novocherkassk City in the Province of Don Cossack Voisko. The city does not fit into the picture of the real world; it moves every day a couple kilometers from the point it was seen before; Mongol Emperor Tughe, the ruler of the city, knows nothing about the existence of Russian Emperor Alexander (who in turn has never heard of Tughe).

Otroshenko creates a reality in which the relation between incidents, characters, and setting could not be based upon or justified by laws of nature or their normal acceptance by human mentality.

Ludmila Ulitskaya is awarded 2011 Prix Simone de Beauvoir pour la liberté des femmes - 16/12/2010

Featured titles

Soviet Education, a novel by Olga Medvedkova

CASE OF ENGINEER TOWN, 2008