Journalist Cathryn Prince signs book contract with Palgrave Macmillan.

Stalin’s Last Torpedo by Cathryn J. Prince—the little known story of history’s largest maritime disaster—is under contract with Palgrave Macmillan. Prince plans to write it largely through the perspective of the surviving eyewitnesses.

At the end of World War Two, Soviet torpedoes sank the Wilhelm Gustloff—a cruise liner turned escape ship—sending roughly 9,000 German refugees to the bottom of the Baltic Sea. In contrast, the Titanic claimed 1,500 lives in a peacetime disaster, and the Lusitania claimed 1,198 lives in a military disaster. For 65 years, Nazi and Soviet censorship condemned the story to obscurity. Günther Grass fictionalized the events in Crabwalk (published in 2002), yet most Americans remain unfamiliar with this tragedy.

Swenson Book Development, LLC, congratulates client Cathryn Prince on this new book project. Luba Ostashevsky will be Cathryn Prince’s editor at Palgrave Macmillan and she is a wonderful champion for this incredible tale. Swenson Book Development, LLC, is pleased to have worked with Cathryn Prince in the development of both Stalin’s Last Torpedo and A Professor, a President, and a Meteor: The Birth of American Science (Prometheus), for which she won the Connecticut Press Club’s 2011 Book Award for non-fiction. Prince is also the author of Burn the Town and Sack the Banks: Confederates Attack Vermont! and Shot from the Sky: American POWs in Switzerland.

For years Cathryn Prince wrote as a contributing correspondent to The Christian Science Monitor. While in Switzerland she covered the Nazi Gold Crisis, the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the Swiss Parliament, and a wire tapping scandal. She also wrote about cow fights and chocolate. These days Cathryn covers the Connecticut State House for Patch.com and is a regular contributor to Weston Magazine.

To learn more about Cathryn Prince and her new book project, see her website www.cathrynprince.com and read her blog. She is also on Facebook and @CathrynPrince on Twitter. Cathryn Prince makes history fresh everyday.