From the press release:

English PEN today announced a new prize for translated literature, to celebrate the 5th anniversary of its Writers in Translation programme. The English PEN Literature in Translation Award will be presented on Monday 8th November at a reception to be held at the Free Word Centre in Farringdon, London.

The winner of the inaugural English PEN Literature in Translation Award is Putin’s Russia by Anna Politkovskaya, an unsparing dissection of the corruption, cronyism, violence and fraud perpetrated under Putin’s presidency. The book was banned in Russia; two years after its UK publication, in October 2006, Politkovskaya was shot dead in the stairwell of her Moscow apartment block.

The Writers in Translation Committee has chosen Putin’s Russia for its intelligence, lucidity, fearless commitment to the higher ideals of freedom of speech, and the quality of its translation. The prize fund will be divided between the estate of Anna Politkovskaya and the book’s translator, Arch Tait. The Committee also commends The Harvill Press (now Harvill Secker) for its strong publicity and marketing campaigns in support of the book.

All great news—for the book, for the existence of the away, for the translator.

“A Russian Diary” is a posthumous testimonial to Politkovskaya’s reportorial skills and her despair about what has happening to her country. Drawn from the journals she kept between December 2003 and August 2005, it frames Putin’s reelection as a rigged event that, among other things, pulled the curtain on how the government responded after Chechen terrorists took hostages in a Moscow theater in 2002. Politkovskaya, who went to Chechnya 39 times as a reporter for the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, had been called in to try to negotiate with the hostage takers, but to no avail. Russian forces stormed the theater, killing not only the terrorists but also 130 of the 912 hostages. She held the government accountable.

…which reminded me of Arkady Babchenko’s One Soldier’s War. yesterday from Grove, and is about Babchenko’s experience fighting the Chechen War. I read an excerpt of this on submission a few years ago (didn’t get the book, unfortunately), and I’ve been dying to read the whole translation ever since. It’s an incredibly written, macabre, and stark look at a war which few of us in the West hear anything about.

There was an excerpt of One Soldier’s War in Harper’s this month, which you can if you’re a subscriber. Seriously, .