Best popular science books of 2024 announced

  • 21 Nov 2024

  • The Enlightener Awards Group has announced its laureates: the best popular science books of the year 2024. The live awards ceremony took place in Berlin, at the Theater im Delphi. The jury board chose the best non-fiction books, both written in and translated into the Russian language, in two nominations: Natural and Exact Sciences and Humanities. They have also announced the winner of the special award, PolitProsvet, which since 2022 rewards books on pressing social and political topics.

    The awards ceremony was streaming live from two cities at once, Moscow and Berlin. In Germany it was hosted by Irina Shikhman, journalist and anchor of the “A Talk?” YouTube channel, while in Russia it was led by journalist and TV presenter Tatiana Malkina. Both auditoriums could see and communicate with each other.
    The stream was live at the Enlightener’s YouTube channel with live screenings also hosted by several partner bookstores: the Turgenev Library in Paris, Babel in Tel Aviv, and Liberty Books in Lisbon.
    The Enlightener Award was established in 2008 by Dmitry Zimin and operates with support from the Zimin Foundation.

    Here are the titles named the best popular science books of the season:

    🏆 THE ENLIGHTENER

    ▪️ Natural and Exact Sciences

    Maria Kondratova
    The Crooked Mirror of Life. The Main Myths About Cancer and What Today’s Science Makes of Them
    @alpinanonfiction

    ▪️ Humanities

    Ivan Kurilla
    The Americans and All the Rest: The Origins and Meaning of the Foreign Policy of the USA @alpinaru


    🏆 SPECIAL AWARD POLITPROSVET
    Anton Dolin
    The Bad Russians. The Birth of Putinism From Commercial Cinema
    @meduzalive

    Special mention from the jury: The Encyclopaedia of Dissidence: the USSR, 1956–1989 by various authors, edited by Alexander Daniel @nlobooks @polniypc @toposmemoru

    🏆 The ENLIGHTENER TRANSLATION

    ▪️ Natural and Exact Sciences

    Stuart Ritchie
    Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth @corpusbooks

    translated by Alena Yakimenko
    edited by Ekaterina Vladimirskaya

    ▪️ Humanities

    Stephen Walker
    Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey into Space @alpinanonfiction

    translated by Natalia Lisova
    edited by Igor Lisov Vyacheslav Ionov
    ⠀