Congratulations to Rosemary Sullivan, winner of the prestigious 2016 RBC Taylor Prize for Literary Nonfiction for Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva. The $25,000 award was announced on Monday afternoon.
Sullivan’s biography has also won the 2015 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction and the BC National Non-Fiction Award, and is a finalist for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography.
Based on extensive research, including interviews with Svetlana’s surviving family and access to KGB, CIA and FBI files, this impeccable, riveting biography explores the life of Josef Stalin’s only daughter, from her childhood in the Kremlin, to her daring defection to the US via India in 1967, to her troubled years in Middle America. The New York Times Book Review called it “an extraordinary glimpse into one of the grimmest chapters of the past century,” The Independent raved about its “combination of tragedy and history worthy of a Russian novel,” and O, the Oprah Magazine, praised it as “magisterial.”