Awards, Film and Media

The Alexander Medvedkin Reader receives 2017 AATSEEL Award

The Alexander Medvedkin Reader cover image
The University of Chicago Press is proud to announce that The Alexander Medvedkin Reader has been named the best scholarly translation into English for 2017 by the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages.

Translated by film scholars Jay Leyda and Nikita Lary in cooperation with Alexander Medvedkin himself, the book offers unprecedented insight into Medvedkin’s film making demonstrating the importance of his work as a crucial link in the history of documentary film, on par with that of his contemporaries Sergei Eisenstein and Alexander Dovzhenko.

But you don’t have to take our word for it. The prize announcement on the AATSEEL website offers a great overall picture of the book and the decades-long history of its translation and compilation. Calling it a “mother lode of source material for research on Medvedkin” the announcement continues:

The translations are lucid and readable, ably conveying the tone and style of the original. The publication of The Alexander Medvedkin Reader fills a major lacuna in our understanding of early Soviet cinema, and is a gift whose value to the global community of film scholars and film enthusiasts is hard to overestimate.

Congratulations to Nikita Lary and the rest of the book team for producing such a groundbreaking work of cinema scholarship!

Keep up to date on more award-winning titles from the University of Chicago Press @UCPressAwards