Lyudmila Evgenyevna Ulitskaya is an internationally acclaimed modern Russian novelist and short-story writer who, in 2014, was awarded the prestigious Austrian State Prize for European Literature for her oeuvre. In 2006 she published Daniel Stein, Interpreter(Даниэль Штайн, переводчик), a novel dealing with the Holocaust and the need for reconciliation between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. She won the 2012 Park Kyong-ni Prize.
Emmanuel Carrère is a French author, screenwriter and film director.
Andrey Yuryevich Kurkov is a Ukrainian author and public intellectual who writes in Russian and Ukrainian. He is the author of 19 novels, including the bestselling Death and the Penguin, nine books for children, and about 20 documentary, fiction and TV movie scripts. His work is currently translated into 37 languages, including English, Spanish, Japanese, French, German, Italian, Chinese, Swedish, Persian and Hebrew, and published in 65 countries. Kurkov, who has long been a respected commentator on Ukraine for the international media, notably in Europe and the United States, has written assorted articles for various publications worldwide. His books are full of black humour, post-Soviet reality and elements of surrealism.
The International Booker Prize is an international literary award hosted in the United Kingdom. The introduction of the International Prize to complement the Man Booker Prize, as the Booker Prize was then known, was announced in June 2004. Sponsored by the Man Group, from 2005 until 2015 the award was given every two years to a living author of any nationality for a body of work published in English or generally available in English translation. It rewarded one author's "continued creativity, development and overall contribution to fiction on the world stage", and was a recognition of the writer's body of work rather than any one title.
Guðmundur Andri Thorsson is an editor, critic, and author born in Iceland on 31 December 1957. He received his degree in literature in 1983 from the University of Iceland. His first work was as a literary critic in the 1980s.
Magda Szabó was a Hungarian novelist. Doctor of philology, she also wrote dramas, essays, studies, memoirs, poetry and children's literature. She was a founding member of the Digital Literary Academy, an online digital repository of Hungarian literature. She is the most translated Hungarian author, with publications in 42 countries and over 30 languages.
Death and the Penguin is a novel by Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov. Originally published in 1996 in Russian, it was translated and published in English in 2001. The events of the novel take place in 1996 and 1997 in Kyiv. It is a bleak, satirical work with surreal elements and dark humour.
Marina Lewycka is a British novelist of Ukrainian origin.
The Door is a novel by Hungarian writer Magda Szabó. The Door was originally published in Hungary in 1987, and translated into English in 1995 by Stefan Draughon for American publication, and again in 2005 by Len Rix for British publication. Rix's translation won the 2006 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, and was short-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Rix's translation was republished in 2015 by New York Review Books Classics.
Spouses Maryna Yuryivna Dyachenko and Serhiy Serhiyovych Dyachenko are co-authors of fantasy literature from Ukraine writing in Russian. Three of their novels have been translated into English. At the World and All-European Science Fiction Convention Eurocon 2005 in Glasgow, Marina and Serhiy Dyachenko were recognized as the best science fiction writers in Europe.
Two Caravans is a novel by Marina Lewycka. It was published by Penguin Books on 29 March 2007 for the United Kingdom market. In the United States and Canada it is published under the title Strawberry Fields. The story focuses on characters who are migrant labourers of various backgrounds working in England's agricultural industry, in particular, portraying Eastern Europeans in the United Kingdom. The book follows Lewycka's debut novel A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for political writing in 2008.
The Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize is the United Kingdom's first literary award for comic literature. Established in 2000 and named in honour of P. G. Wodehouse, past winners include Paul Torday in 2007 with Salmon Fishing in the Yemen and Marina Lewycka with A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian 2005 and Jasper Fforde for The Well of Lost Plots in 2004. Gary Shteyngart was the first American winner in 2011.
Elements of fantastical or supernatural fiction have been part of mainstream Russian literature since the 18th century. Russian fantasy developed from the centuries-old traditions of Slavic mythology and folklore. Russian science fiction emerged in the mid-19th century and rose to its golden age during the Soviet era, both in cinema and literature, with writers like the Strugatsky brothers, Kir Bulychov, and Mikhail Bulgakov, among others. Soviet filmmakers produced a number science fiction and fantasy films. With the fall of the Iron Curtain, modern Russia experienced a renaissance of fantasy. Outside modern Russian borders, there are a significant number of Russophone writers and filmmakers from Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, who have made a notable contribution to the genres.
Penguin Lost is a novel by Andrey Kurkov. Originally published in 2005 in Russian, it was translated by George Bird and published in English in 2010. It is the sequel to the author's novel Death and the Penguin.
Dmitry Ivanovich Maevsky was a Soviet Russian painter, lived and worked in Leningrad, a member of the Leningrad Union of Artists, regarded as one of the representatives of the Leningrad school of painting, most famous for his lyrical landscapes.
Mikhail Davidovich Natarevich was a Soviet, Russian painter who lived and worked in Leningrad; he was a member of the Leningrad Union of Artists, and was regarded as one of the brightest representatives of the Leningrad School of Painting.
A Matter of Death and Life is a novel by Andrey Kurkov. Originally published in 1996 in Russian, it was translated and published in English in 2005.
We Are All Made of Glue is English novelist Marina Lewycka's third novel, published in 2009. The book follows the friendship of Georgina, a recently separated middle-aged freelance journalist and Mrs Shapiro, an elderly lady who lives with seven cats in a dilapidated North London mansion.
Boris Dralyuk is a Ukrainian-American writer, editor and translator. He obtained his high school degree from Fairfax High School and his PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from UCLA. He teaches in the English Department at the University of Tulsa. He has taught Russian literature at his alma mater and at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. He was executive editor and editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books from 2016 to 2022 and the managing editor of Cardinal Points from 2016 to 2022. In 2024 he was named the editor-in-chief of Nimrod International Journal.
Grey Bees is a novel by Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov. Originally published in 2018, it translated by Boris Dralyuk and published in English in 2020 and in 2022, winning the inaugural Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize from the National Book Critics Circle. It was also translated into French by Paul Lequesne as Les Abeilles grises, which won the 2022 Prix Médicis étranger.
