A fiery propagandist of the Kremlin, Margarita Simonyan, the chief editor of Russia's RT channel, has been involved in a new scandal.
Medianews.az reports that currently the selection of works nominated for Russia’s “Big Book” national literary award is underway.
Simonyan has also submitted her dystopian novel titled “In the Beginning Was the Word – in the End There Will Be a Number” to this competition.
On April 22, the expert council announced that 29 works had advanced to the next selection stage in the fiction nomination. The list was announced by the council's chairman, writer Andrey Astvatsaturov, at an event held at TASS agency’s press center. At the same time, the list was published on the TASS website and in the “Kommersant” newspaper.
However, later a list containing 30 nominees for the fiction nomination was posted on the official website and Telegram channel of the competition. The Telegram post also noted that the list had been edited.
In the updated list, Margarita Simonyan’s novel was included instead of the work by writer Andrey Stolyarov, and it appeared in the 25th position.
In a statement published on April 23 on behalf of the competition’s leader Tatyana Voskovskaya, the incident was described as an “extremely unpleasant mistake.” It was noted that Simonyan’s book was originally on the list, but due to a technical error during preparation for the press conference, it was not included in the list.
But what is the reason why when the list was published in the media, the organizers did not tell journalists that there was an error there, and later silently changed the list on the official website of the competition? There has been no response from the organizers to this question, which is rapidly circulating on Russia’s social networks.
Already, several Russian writers have begun to strongly protest against Margarita Simonyan’s name being added to the list later.
The “Big Book” award was established in 2005 and aims to reward authors of the best fiction and nonfiction works written in the Russian language.