We are pleased to announce that the 2026 Canadian Association of Slavists’ Taylor & Francis Book Prize in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies has been awarded to Lilia Topouzova for Unsilencing: The History and Legacy of the Bulgarian Gulag (Cornell University Press, 2025).

In its report, the book prize jury offers the following commendation: “Unsilencing: The History and Legacy of the Bulgarian Gulag is a tour-de-force of scholarship that dazzled the committee with its breadth, depth, and quality of analysis. Spanning twenty years of work in four languages and dealing with a subject that historians have largely neglected to this point, Unsilencing is extremely well written and conceived while dealing with a hitherto fragmentary and complex historiography. Topouzova tells not only the story of the Bulgarian Gulag (particularly the Belene and Lovech camps), but also the story of how this difficult chapter in twentieth-century Bulgarian history was deliberately obfuscated, concealed, and overwritten. She painstakingly documents the January 1990 destruction order for 144,235 files and explains its significance. Engaging with previous attempts to define and engage with the Gulag’s legacy, Topouzova revises Tzvetan Todorov’s camp/prison distinction. Finally, the committee was impressed with Topouzova’s interpretation of Lovech’s extreme violence as a product of half-implemented de-Stalinization rather than a return to it. It was also refreshing to see how candid Topouzova is about what her sources cannot bear.”

The jury also recognized two books with honourable mention: 

Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston’s Randia’s Quiet Theatre: Performing Care and Activism with a Romani Elder (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025)  examines the problem of Poland’s “prisoners of the fourth floor” – elderly people with disabilities who are socially and economically marginalized. Kazubowski-Houston has written a methodologically inventive work, which blends ethnography with improvisational methods taken from theatre to focus on the life of a Romani fortune teller and storyteller. Kazubowski-Houston’s experimentation pays off: her comparison of interviews with storytelling sessions with the same person reveals two distinct subjectivities and serves to make Randia a figure for “prisoners of the fourth floor” more broadly. Kazubowski-Houston’s concept of “awkward reflexivity” is a genuinely portable concept.

Eva Plach’s Relief on the Hoof: The Seagoing Cowboys, The Heifer Project, and UNRRA in Poland (Northern Illinois University Press, 2025) tells the surprising story of the horses and cattle shipped to Poland by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in the aftermath of World War II and of the “seagoing cowboys” who looked after them, who were recruited by the Church of the Brethren as part of their humanitarian Heifer Project. The jury found Relief on the Hoof’s object of research to be truly original and pathbreaking. Plach’s multilayered field of study brings together an impressive transatlantic archive and provides a rich set of answers to the questions it poses about how different institutions and communities understood relief, rehabilitation, and humanitarianism following the devastation of the Second World War. 

Special thanks to the jury members (Kate Holland, Roman Krakowsky, and Ivan Simic) for their hard work and, of course, congratulations to Lilia Topouzova, Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston, and Eva Plach!