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“Sometimes funny, frequently harrowing, always illuminating, This Cursed Beautiful Land is more than the story of a news reporter who became the news. Gershkovich lives in two worlds at once—American and Russian, observer and protagonist, subject and object—while an autocratic regime tries to reduce him to a trading chip. This book is a testament to the humanity he refused to surrender, and a prison memoir that doubles as a love letter, not to the dictatorship that imprisoned him, but to the Russia underneath: its language, landscape, literature, and people.”
—Anthony Doerr, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of All the Light We Cannot See
“In this memoir that reads like a thriller, Evan Gershkovich brings all his reportorial skills to bear as he chronicles his journey through a Kafka-esque justice system ... Evan tells the private story behind his public ordeal, in vivid detail and with a profound understanding of Russian history and prison’s effect on individual lives.”
—Radhika Jones, writer and former editor, Vanity Fair
“His memoir is proof that even during that harrowing time, his reporter’s eye remained as sharp as ever.”
—The New York Times, “The Nonfiction Everyone Will Be Talking About in 2026”
“Idiot.”
—Vladimir Putin
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About the Author
Evan Gershkovich is a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal based in Berlin. Born in New Jersey to Soviet émigrés, he lived in Russia for more than five years before his 2023 arrest and subsequent sixteen-month imprisonment on false espionage charges. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Economist, and Foreign Policy, and he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2025 as part of an investigative team for The Journal. He is the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship.
