The photo-documentary book Red Star Over Russia: A Visual History of the Soviet Union by David King, is the winner of this year’s prestigious Authors’ Club Banister Fletcher Award. The Banister Fletcher Award is awarded annually for the best book on art or architecture.

To order Red Star Over Russia from Mehring Books at a special price of $40, click here.

The German edition, Roter Stern über Russland, published by Mehring Verlag based in Essen, was named photo book of the month by the German magazine Universitas this past summer. The German edition is available here.

In his remarkable book, King presents over 550 photographs, posters and works of art in the highest quality, accompanied by informative texts dealing with the history of Russia from 1917 up to the death of Stalin. Drawing on the work of outstanding Soviet designers, artists and photographers, King has rescued many long forgotten figures from oblivion.

David King is the author of The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia (1997) and The Victims of Stalin (2003), as well as many other books about the Soviet Union. He was the editor of the arts section of the London Sunday Times from 1965 to 1975 and possesses one of the world’s most important collections of Russian revolutionary art.

The Authors’ Club annual award commemorates the English architect and surveyor Banister Flight Fletcher (1866–1953), a former president of both the Authors’ Club and the Royal Institute of British Architects.

The Authors’ Club was originally founded by the novelist and critic Walter Besant in 1891 as a place where writers could meet and talk. Early members included Oscar Wilde, George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, Arthur Conan Doyle, J.M. Barrie, Jerome K. Jerome, Ford Madox Ford, H.G. Wells, Compton Mackenzie, Thornton Wilder and Graham Greene, while guest speakers included Emile Zola, Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, Winston Churchill, Bram Stoker, T.S. Eliot and Clement Attlee.

To order Red Star Over Russia from Mehring Books at a special price of $40, click here.