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.

Zwinger, a novel by Elena Kostioukovitch (2013)

Rights sold: Armenia - ORACLE, Italy - BOMPIANI (RCS LIBRI), Russia - CORPUS BOOKS (AST), Serbia - RUSSICA, Ukraine - FOLIO

Elena Kostioukovitch´s Zwinger blends together the genres of historical novel and thriller, with a lively and ironic style. In the frame of a fictional detective story, the book investigates deeply into the real mysteries of the Twentieth century history through precious documents and direct testimonies of the author.

«Just before Victor Zieman was faxed the severed head of his assistant Mireille, he was sitting in the Iroha restaurant in Frankfurt with Behr, eating tempura. It was Wednesday. All this mayhem had started on the Saturday before the Book Fair, in Victor’s Milan apartment where everything looked exactly the same as it always did.»

Seven wild days in the life of Zwinger's main character, Victor Sieman, twist together into a tight knot of quest and adventure, where the final, true goal...

Inhabitants of the Funny Cemetery, a novel by Andrei Ivanov (2019)

Rights sold: Estonia - VARRAK, Russia - EKSMO

Winner of the 2019 Estonian Cultural Endowment’s Russian Author Award

Inhabitants of the Funny Cemetery is a panoramic novel which vividly brings to life the worlds of three generations of Russian émigrés in Paris. To recap, the Russian emigration began with the October Revolution and continued apace for two decades, meaning that by the start of the Second World War almost 80,000 Russians had established themselves in France. Paris quickly became the capital of the Russian emigration, not to be replaced by New York until the middle of the century.

The novel contains multiple voices, including three first-person protagonists, whose voices start to overlap, to intertwine, and set off unexpected echoes. The novel’s main narrator is the Soviet émigré Viktor Lipatov (not necessarily his real name), a former dissident who spent several years in psychiatric detention, fled to America, and then arrived...

Ludmila Ulitskaya is awarded 2011 Prix Simone de Beauvoir pour la liberté des femmes - 10/01/2011

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Zwinger, a novel by Elena Kostioukovitch (2013)

Inhabitants of the Funny Cemetery, a novel by Andrei Ivanov (2019)