Ilona Chavasse

Jul 5, 2024 | thebookseller.com | Ilona Chavasse

Our world is more connected than ever: no place is a valley, a mountaintop, an island. Words are everywhere you look, and fiction assures us of our shared humanity, but it’s a very particular kind of non-fiction that tells us about the here and now. Last week the journalist and activist Elena Kostyuchenko received the 2024 Pushkin House Prize for I Love Russia: Reportage From a Lost Country (Bodley Head UK and Penguin Press US).

Oct 26, 2023 | lmtonline.com | Bela Shayevich |Ilona Chavasse |Nick Hilden

Penguin Press. 363 pp. $30 - - - "If you want to stay safe," the journalist Elena Kostyuchenko writes in "I Love Russia: Reporting From a Lost Country," "you must put a smile on your face." She's referring to the conditions in one of Russia's hellish "internat" facilities for the disabled, but you get the sense that the sentiment could be applied to the country at large: The prerequisite to safety is the acceptance of the maddest of circumstances, and even that is no guarantee.