Preis der Leipziger Buchmesse 2025 goes to Irina Rastorgueva
The Preis der Leipziger Buchmesse celebrates the best new publications in the German language and selects one work of fiction, one work of non-fiction and one translation. The winners have been announced!
In the non-fiction category, our author Irina Rastorgueva was awarded the prize with Pop-up-Propaganda. Epikrise der russischen Selbstvergiftung (2024, Matthes & Seitz).
An eye-opening analysis of the propaganda machine in contemporary Russia, its disturbing background and brutal mechanisms that permeate all social relations, by an author who was born in Russia and now lives in Berlin.
Citing numerous examples, Irina Rastorgueva shows that the Russian propaganda is becoming increasingly one-dimensional and aggressive, flooding the narrative with pseudo-science and hate speeches in order to destabilize. Censorship, the ban of critical media and punishment of scientists and journalists who challenge the propagated views are becoming the norm. This violence that has a relentless grip on Russian society is a continuation of the paranoid search for enemies, the nightly arrests, searches and torture as well as the gulags from the Soviet regime – in a garish, new guise and fused with the gangsterism of the 1990s.
In her unique tone, which is as precise as it is ironic, Irina Rastorgueva shows the effects of Russian self-poisoning in a montage of newspaper clippings and independent reports, from her own experience as well as from the analyses of authors critical of the Kremlin and loyal to Russia.
The jury declared:
Irina Rastorgueva shows with relentless vividness how Putin's propaganda machine works; how lies, aggression and contradictions destabilise Russian reality and replace it with an almost impenetrable hall of mirrors. But Rastorgueva's book also offers a toolbox for resistance; a chapter in comic form even gives very specific advice on how to participate in demonstrations. A book as urgent and clear as Victor Klemperer's ‘Lingua Tertii Imperii’ was.
