The Enlightener and Enlightener.Translation awards announce 2025 shortlists

  • 18 Sep 2025

  • Today, September 18, Dmitry Zimin’s book awards, the Enlightener and the Enlightener.Translation, have published their shortlists. Fifteen books are going to compete for the title of the best non-fiction of 2025, among them books about Letov and Pinocchio, emperors and desmans, animal criminals, and playing animals.

    The Enlightener Award


    The three finalists in the Natural and Exact Sciences nomination are:

    1. Maxim Vinarsky. The Dead Lion: A Postmortem Biography of Darwin and His Ideas. Moscow: Alpina Non-Fiction, 2024.
    2. Alexey Levin. Sketches on Particles: From X-Ray Photons To the Higgs Boson. Мoscow: Scientific Press LTD KMK, 2024.
    3. Nadezhda Pankova. On Boars, Beavers, and Russian Desmans. Moscow: Albus Corvus, 2025.

     

    These four books will compete for the prize in the Humanities nomination:

    1. Alexander Gorbachev. He Saw the Sun. Yegor Letov and His Time. Moscow: Vyrgorod, 2025.
    2. Konstantin Yerusalimsky. The Emperor of the Holy Russia. Moscow: New Literary Observer, 2025.
    3. Ivan Krivushin. A Hundred Days In the Grasps of Madness: the Rwandan Genocide of 1995. Moscow: Higher School of Economics Press, 2024.
    4. Yaroslav Shimov, Andrey Shary. For the Nation and Order! Central Europe and the Balkans Between World Wars. Chișinău: The Historical Expertise, 2025.

    The jury would like to reward the book The Shelf: The History of Russian Poetry with an honorable mention. “This book receives very high scores, but after a lengthy discussion, the jury left it out of the shortlist,” said Andrey Konyaev. “One of the articles comprising this book was written by the head of the jury board, which resulted in a conflict of interests. Giving the award to this book would have gone against our values, so we decided it made no sense to include it into the shortlist. But we also did not want to just discard its high scores.”

    Based on the ruling of an independent scientific expertise, the jury did not consider the book The Pulsating Universe when selecting titles for the shortlist.

    The titles in the shortlist of the Enlightener 2005 were selected by the following jury board, presided over by writer, educator, and documentalist Alexander Arkhangelsky:
    Aglaya Asheshova, president of the Association of the Turgenev Library in Paris, head of the Fund of the Russian Book at the University Library of Languages and Civilizations (Bulac), member of Memorial France Association.
    Maria Kondratova, PhD, a molecular biologist, winner of The Enlightener 2024 for her book The Crooked Mirror of Life. Main Myths About Cancer and What Contemporary Science Thinks About Them.
    Andrey Konyaev, PhD, physicist and mathematician, professor at the Ohio University, publisher of N+1.
    Ivan Kurilla, PhD, a historian, professor at the Ohio University, winner of the Enlightener 2024 for his book The Americans and the Rest.
    Sergey Popov, astrophysicist, professor of the Russian Academy of Sciences, winner of the award For Loyalty to Science.

     

    The Enlightener.Translation Award

    In the Natural and Exact Sciences nomination the Enlightener.Translation presents the following titles:

    1. Mary Roach. Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law / translated from English by Galina Borodina, scientific editor Mikhail Nikitin, editor Oleg Bocharnikov. Moscow: Alpina Non-Fiction, 2025.
    2. Ian Stewarrt. What’s the Use? How Mathematics Shapes Everyday Life / translated from English by Natalia Lisova; scientific editor Konstantin Knop, editor Vyacheslav Ionov. Moscow: Alpina Non-Fiction, 2024.
    3. David Toomey. Kingdom of Play: What Ball-bouncing Octopuses, Belly-flopping Monkeys, and Mud-sliding Elephants Reveal about Life Itself / translated from English by Maria Yeliferova; edited by Olga Volkova. Moscow: CORPUS, 2025.
    4. Govert Schilling. The Elephant in the Universe: Our Hundred-Year Search for Dark Matter / translated from Eglish by Andrey Dambis, edited by Serafima Dovgan. Moscow: Lyod, 2025.

    In the Humanities category, these titles made their way into the shortlist:

    1. Giorgio Agmben. Pinocchio: The Adventures of a Puppet, Doubly Commented Upon and Triply Illustrated / translated from Italian by Marina Kozlova; scientific editor Stanislav Mukhamedzhanov, editor Alina Klimnika. Moscow: Lyod, 2025.
    2. Dominic Lieven. In the Shadow of the Gods: The Emperor in World History / translated from English by Evgenia Fomenko, edited by Alexandra Lavrenova. Moscow: CORPUS, 2024.
    3. Friedrich Meinecke. The German Catastrophe / translated from German by Nikolay Vlasov, edited by Irina Kravtsova. St. Petersburg: Ivan Libbach Press, 2024.
    4. Peter Turchin. End Times / translated from English by V. Zhelninov, edited by Olga Kololeva, Natalia Nikitenko. Moscow: AST Press, 2024.

    The finalists of Enlightener.Translation were hand picked by the following jury board headed by Oleg Voskoboinikov, PhD, a historian, medievalist, translator, cofounder and scientific director of Stradarium, doctor at the Higher School of Social Sciences:
    Ekaterina Aksenova, author of prometa.pro blog and Telegram channel dedicated to non-fiction books, leader of book clubs.
    Victor Sonkin, PhD, philologist, journalist, translator, winner of the Enlightener 2013 award for his book Here Was Rome.
    Yulia Sineokaya, Doctor of philosophy, historian of philosophy at Sorbonne Pantheon.


    Special award PolitProsvet is working to roll out its shortlist September 25. Winners of all the Enlightener Awards will be announced November 20.