Olivier Rolin shortlisted for the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize!
At the book office, we are very proud to announce that Olivier Rolin's novel Stalin’s Meteorologist: One Man’s Untold Story of Love, Life and Death has been shortlisted for the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize! It won our Burgess grant and we promoted it last year as one of our Book of the week and also as one of our Book of the year!
Translated by Ros Schwartz and published by Harvill Secker (Penguin), Stalin’s Meteorologist is the story of Alexey Wangenheim, head of the Sovet Union's meteorology department cell in Lubyanka prison.
The Book: Stalin’s Meteorologist: One Man’s Untold Story of Love, Life and Death
One fateful day in 1934, a husband arranged to meet his wife under the colonnade of the Bolshoi theatre. As she waited for him in vain, he was only a few hundred metres away, in a cell in the notorious Lubyanka prison.
Less than a year before, Alexey Wangenheim – a celebrated meteorologist – had been hailed by Stalin as a national hero. But following his sudden arrest, he was exiled to a gulag, forced to spend his remaining years on an island in the frozen north, along with thousands of other political prisoners.
By chance, Olivier Rolin discovered an album of the letters and beautiful drawings of the natural world which Alexey sent home to his wife, Varvara, and his four-year-old daughter, Eleonora. Intrigued by these images, Rolin became determined to uncover Alexey’s story and his eventual horrifying fate.
Stalin’s Meteorologist is the fascinating and deeply moving account of an innocent man and his family caught up in the brutality of Soviet paranoia, and a timely reminder of the human consequences of political extremism.
According to Lucy Ash who reviewed the novel in The Guardian, Olivier Rolin 'uncovers an all too familiar, yet heartbreaking, story'.
Don't forget to follow the Book Office's official Twitter account for more literary news!