Publication

Garrard Publication Wins Major Italian Literary Prize

Professor John Garrard, Department of Russian & Slavic Studies, and his wife and coauthor have won the Giovanni Comisso Prize for the best biography published in Italian in 2009. Their biography, The Bones of Berdichev: The Life & Fate of Vasily Grossman (published by The Free Press, 1996), was translated into Italian by Marta Cai and Roberto Franzini Tibaldeo; and published by Marietta 1820 as Le Ossa de Berdichev: La vita e il destino di Vasilij Grossman (Genoa/Geneva, 2009).

The Giovanni Comisso Prize is one of the most important prizes for fiction and non-fiction biography given in Italy. John and Carol Garrard were the only non-Italians nominated, and their award was announced at a gala celebration held in a restored palazzo in Treviso in late September 2009.

The Bones of Berdichev uses the life of Vasily Grossman, the Red Army’s leading war correspondent in World War II, to examine two vast and underreported tragedies: the murder of Soviet Jews in the Occupied USSR, and the vicious and callous treatment meted out to Red Army soldiers by not only the German Wehrmacht and SS but also the Soviet High Command. Grossman was at the front for over 1,000 days, including the three months of street fighting during the Battle of Stalingrad.

John Garrard, professor of Russian literature at the UA since 1984, and his wife Carol have coauthored four books. Garrard learned Russian while serving in British Intelligence in a secret program at Cambridge University, and later was able to access and translate virtually the entirety of Grossman’s secret police file.

The Garrards hope to bring the traveling exhibit on Vasily Grossman and the Battle of Stalingrad , created at Torino, to the University of Arizona in 2010.