The Hunger Games prequel novel was released in Russia at the same time as the rest of the world

On March 25, a book by American writer Susan Collins, Dawn of the Harvest, was published in Russia simultaneously with the rest of the world, which is the first prequel novel of the Hunger Games saga in five years. On this day, Izvestia was told by the AST publishing house.

In Russia, the book is published in its original cover. The new novel expands the "Hunger Games" universe and tells about the events that happened 24 years before the main saga.

At the center of the action is Haymitch Abernathy, the future mentor of Katniss Everdeen, the main character of the saga. Together with three other participants from District 12, he goes to the Capitol, knowing that it is almost impossible to survive in such games, because the danger is not limited only to the arena: the most terrible enemies lurk outside it.

The publisher said that the novel's translator Daria Tselovalnikova worked on the previous book in the series "The Ballad of Snakes and Songbirds", as well as on the Russian text of works by Oscar Wilde, George Orwell and Charlotte Bronte.

According to the translator, there were two main difficulties in translation — puns with names, especially with the speaking surname of the main villain, the future president of Panem, Coriolanus Snow, and the poems that the author writes into the text. In her previous book, "The Ballad of Snakes and Songbirds," Collins gave the entire relatively uncomplicated ballad about Lucy Grey by the English poet William Wordsworth.

The sequel follows: "Izvestia" publishes a fragment of the new novel about "The Hunger Games"

An exclusive excerpt from Susan Collins' text Dawn of the Harvest, which will be released in Russian Federation in March

"In the new book, the author has surpassed herself and written into the novel the most famous poem by the American poet Edgar Poe. It soon turned out that none of the two dozen Russian translation options were suitable for the book: one poet misinterpreted Poe, another did not understand, then the third made up, omitting the very essence, and I had to summon the muse, roll up my sleeves and take up the pen, so to speak," said the translator.

The Hunger Games series consists of three books in the main trilogy (The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay), as well as a prequel, The Ballad of Snakes and Songbirds, published in 2020.

On February 20, Izvestia newspaper returned to the long—standing tradition of publishing new works by the main writers of our time. Maxim Gorky, Mikhail Sholokhov, Andrey Voznesensky, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Vasily Shukshin, and Valentin Rasputin have appeared on the newspaper's pages over the years. The first in the series was an exclusive excerpt from the novel "Dawn of the Harvest".