Margarita Simonyan was retroactively added to the list of contenders for the Big Book Prize...

Margarita Simonyan was retroactively added to the list of contenders for the Big Book Prize. After the publicity, the organizers said the propagandist’s book had supposedly been there from the very beginning

Margarita Simonyan’s novel In the Beginning Was the Word — in the End There Will Be the Digit was added to the longlist of the Big Book Prize retroactively, the Telegram channel Knizhizhar noted.

Initially, the longlist consisted of 29 names, and Russian media outlets had already managed to publish the list. On the prize’s website and Telegram channel, the list already contained 30 books. The post in the Big Book Telegram channel had been edited.

After the publicity, the prize organizers said that Simonyan’s novel had been on the longlist from the very beginning, but that an “extremely unpleasant mistake” had occurred:

“When preparing materials for the press conference, part of the data from the internal Excel spreadsheet with the results of the Expert Council’s work on forming the Long List for the 21st season was incorrectly transferred due to inattention.”

Georgy Urushadze, owner of the Freedom Letters publishing house, suggested on TV Rain that the prize experts did not agree with adding Simonyan’s book to the longlist:

The book really is stupid, this kind of “hellish graphomania.” I read one chapter, and that was enough for me. It is madness. That chapter is the best one; they put it out specially at the start of sales to show, look, what a work this is. It is not literature at all, it is just absolute graphomania. So I think the prize experts did not agree. That is exactly why someone added [the book to the longlist] after the lists had already been sent out.

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