‘Memoir with recipes’ wins inaugural unpublished manuscript award

Food writer, social historian and journalist Anna Kharzeeva’s “memoir with recipes” has won the inaugural Wingate Award for Unpublished Manuscripts (Jewish Subject).

The prize is part of the 2024 Shalom Australian Jewish Book Awards, created by the not-for-profit to recognise excellence in contemporary Jewish Australian writing.

Kharzeeva’s non-fiction manuscript, Warm Walls: A journey from Moscow to Sydney, to self. A memoir with recipes, reflects on her Russian-Jewish ancestry and decision to leave Moscow in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Each of the 10 chapters incorporates a kitchen object from her four-generation family home, and ends with a recipe suited to the object.

Speaking to The Jewish Independent, Kharzeeva said the award was “a massive vote of confidence” for her manuscript, which is only a third completed.

“I’ve had a couple of rejections from publishers, and I’ve thought no-one is going to be interested, especially because it’s a Jewish story and a Russian story. You just wonder if it’s even possible to publish something like that today, even though I think it’s an important story to share,” she said.

“It means a lot because now I feel like it’s a worthy story. I feel like I can get it across the line.”

Kharzeeva – who was born and raised in Moscow and moved to Sydney in March 2022 – is also the author of The Soviet Diet Cookbook: exploring life, culture and history – one recipe at a time, which similarly dissects history, society and family through the prism of food.

In Warm Walls, Kharzeeva describes her own experience of being Russian and opposing the Ukraine war, and uses flashbacks to tell the stories of generations of women who came before her and, like her, have had to decide whether to stay or leave Russia due to various historical events.

“It traces the history of one Russian-Jewish family, but it’s representative of many other families as well,” Kharzeeva explained.

The judging panel – comprised of author Lee Kofman, broadcaster and journalist Ramona Koval, and researcher and writer Jonathan Kaplan – commended Kharzeeva’s relatable and resilient writing.

“In Warm Walls, Anna Kharzeeva lays bare her departure from Russia in the wake of its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, as one thread in the rich tapestry of her Russian Jewish family saga,” the judges commented.

“Interspersed with recollections and anecdotes of food and resilience, Kharzeeva’s memoir is not only the story of her own Russian-Jewish family but an important history of the radical evolution of Russian Jewry from the 1917 October Revolution to the present. A timely book that highlights a lesser-known chapter in Jewish history and its reverberations today.”

Kharzeeva’s work was selected from a diverse shortlist of fiction and non-fiction submitted by authors at various stages of their career, which all engage in some capacity with the Jewish experience.

The shortlist included Roz Bellamy’s Eggs and bones: Essays on endings and beginnings (non-fiction); Merav Fima’s The Rose of Thirteen Petals and the Pomegranate Tree (fiction); Alex Ryvchin’s The Killing Field (fiction); and Sarah Sassoon’s Baghdad Girl (fiction, children/young adult). Entries by Anna Jacobson, Julia Levitina, Carol Millner and Pamela Rushby were highly commended.

The Wingate Award prize includes $4,000, a 10-hour mentorship with judge Lee Kofman, and a manuscript review by Morry Schwartz, owner of Schwartz Publishing. All shortlisted authors also receive a mentoring session with Lee Kofman.

Wingate Founder and CEO, Farrel Meltzer – who supported the award – said it is “an investment in nurturing emerging writers within the community, with the belief that literature has the power to inspire and transform lives”.

In August this year, Anna Jacobson received the $5,000 Young Jewish Writers Award for her second illustrated poetry collection, Anxious in a Sweet Store, while Michael Gawenda won the $10,000 Leslie and Sophie Caplan Award for Jewish Non-Fiction for his book My Life as a Jew.

Kharzeeva hopes to complete her memoir within a year.

Submissions for the 2025 Shalom Australian Jewish Book Awards will open in February next year. Find out more online.