No, the Big Book Prize does not refer to the out-sized, rock-heavy hardbacks which are surprisingly popular around Russian bookshops. Moscow's Bolshaya Kniga (Big Book) is a new and immensely successful national literary competition, which opened its third season last week, days after declaring the winner of last year's round. Lyudmila Ulitskaya, a critically acclaimed novelist and short story writer, was announced as the winner of the second season for her book, Daniel Stein, Translator at a ceremony in Pashkov House on November 22. One of the runners-up was Viktor Pelevin, who is currently one of the most popular and successful writers of the post-Soviet period with Science Fiction and mysticism featuring heavily in his works, which include Clay Machine Gun (Chapaev i Pustota) and Generation P.
The Big Book Competition has taken Russia by storm and despite being criticized by some as being an "Oligarchs' competition" it has nevertheless attained great acclaim.
"It's very easy to create an ‘oligarchs' competition' - just get a group of oligarchs and get them to decide on the winner," says Georgy Urushadze, the general director of the Bolshaya Kniga competition. "For Bolshaya Kniga the Literary Academy, i.e. the jury, which is composed of over 100 people, decides on the winner. The majority of the jury members are critics, publishers, journalists, men of letters, librarians, scientists and others."
Although literary prizes have existed in Moscow for years, Bolshaya Kniga offers substantial rewards. With a prize sum of 3 million rubles (about $ 100,000) and 1.5 million and 1 million to the 2nd and 3rd place, the competition organizers have claimed that it comes second only to the Nobel Prize for literature.
The heavily sponsored competition has benefited from advertising and publicity on a massive scale through Gazprom Media, the largest Russian media holding and subsidiary of Gazprom.
"We want to target a bigger readership and be proud that our main TV channels talk about literature," said Vladimir Grigoryev, chairman of the non-government partnership "Tsentr Slovesnosti" (Literature Center) which founded the competition, at a press-conference inaugurating the third season. "From today, November 27, onwards we will be accepting all types of works."
The competition also differs from others of its kind inasmuch as it accepts not only novels but all types of other written works such as biographies, documentary prose, short stories and memoirs.
In March 2008 a long list of nominees will be drawn up by the jury, which will then be shortlisted in May. The public is also able to vote by email but this vote is independent of the jury's.
"The Big Book Prize is the second biggest in the world after the Nobel Prize," says Urushadze. "We are very pleased that it gained such respect, popularity and authority at its first steps."
"Famous writers can win the competition," he continues, "just as unknown authors can. In any case the prize inevitably leads to great fame for the author."
Dmitry Bykov, a well-known journalist, poet and television entity won the first ever Big Book Prize in 2006 for his biography of Boris Pasternak. With two famous figures under its winners' belt, might Big Book surprise us next November with an unconventional choice?
By Nathalie Cooper
