From a New York Times story by Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth A. Harris headlined “Ukrainian Author Andrey Kurkov Among National Book Critics Circle Award Winners:”

The Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov won a National Book Critics Circle Award for his novel “Grey Bees,” about a beekeeper living in the “gray zone” in the Donbas, a region torn by ongoing conflict between Russian proxies and the Ukrainian military.

In awarding the N.B.C.C.’s inaugural translation prize to Kurkov and his translator, Boris Dralyuk, the committee praised the novel for illuminating “the tragedies suffered on Ukrainian lands while maintaining a broad, humanistic focus on the crisis’s aftermath.”