Andrey Yuryevich Kurkov[a] (born 23 April 1961) is a Ukrainian[1][2] 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.[3] 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.
Kurkov's father was a test pilot and his mother was a doctor. When he was just 2 his family relocated to Kyiv in connection with his father's work.[4] He started writing at the age of seven[5] when, after the death of two of his three pet hamsters, he wrote a poem about the loneliness of the remaining pet. He also produced poetry about Lenin, purportedly inspired by his Soviet education at the time.
Having graduated in 1983 from the Kyiv Foreign Languages Institute, as a trained Japanese translator Kurkov was assigned military service assisting the KGB.[4] However, he managed to get his papers changed to service with the military police. This offered him a greater degree of freedom during and after his service period. He was assigned a prison guard position in Odessa.[5] It was during this period that Kurkov wrote all of his children's stories.
His first novel was published two weeks before the fall of the Soviet Union, and in the ensuing social and political turmoil he made the first steps towards self-publishing and distribution. Borrowing money from friends to fund his work, Kurkov managed to publish independently.[4] While organising distribution around Ukraine, he would also sell copies by hand from stalls on busy streets.
Like many successful writers, Kurkov had difficulty getting his first publishing contract. He reportedly received 500 rejections before being accepted, at which time he had written almost eight complete novels.
Later in his career, he won acclaim as one of the most successful Ukrainian authors in the post-Soviet era and has been featured on European bestseller lists. His novel The Bickford Fuse (published in 2009 in Russian, and in Boris Dralyuk's English-language translation in 2016 by MacLehose Press) was characterised by Sam Leith in The Financial Times as "a sort of cross between The Pilgrim's Progress, Catch-22, Heart of Darkness and Cormac McCarthy's The Road, with a faint shading, here and there, of Samuel Beckett: an insistently dreamlike absurdist satire shaped by the vastness of Russia's landmass and the insanity of its Soviet-era ideology",[6] and reviewed by The Guardian as a "genre-defying work, fusing picaresque adventure with post-apocalyptic parable", while Kurkov himself called it "the dearest and most important of all my works".[7][8] He has been described by Ian Sansom as "a serious writer never more serious than when he's being funny about unfunny things, and with a whole lifetime of unfunny things to be serious about."[9]
In 2018, he was elected as the President of PEN Ukraine.[10]
Kurkov's novel Grey Bees, which has "elements of both the fable and the epic",[11] dramatises the conflict in his country through the adventures of a beekeeper.[12] The novel was translated into French by Paul Lequesne as Les abeilles grises, which won the 2022 Prix Médicis étranger,[13] and into English by Boris Dralyuk, winning the inaugural Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize from the National Book Critics Circle.[14]
In 2024, Kurkov released The Silver Bone, the first in a new series of detective novels titled "The Kyiv Mysteries". The second book The Stolen Heart will be published in 2025.[15] He is in the process of writing the third book The Public Sauna Case.[16]
Kurkov lives in Kyiv with his English wife, Elizabeth, and their three children. After the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, he became an internally displaced person and continued to write and broadcast about the war.[17] A bilingual, native Russian speaker, in a 2022 interview Kurkov speculated that Russia’s war on Ukraine, rather than suppress Ukrainian culture and identity, would potentially have the opposite effect, encouraging Ukrainian writers, especially those whose native language is Russian, to publish increasingly, or even exclusively, in Ukrainian.[18]
Vasily Semyonovich Grossman was a Soviet writer and journalist. Born to a Jewish family in Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire, Grossman trained as a chemical engineer at Moscow State University, earning the nickname Vasya-khimik because of his diligence as a student. Upon graduation, he took a job in Stalino in the Donets Basin. In the 1930s he changed careers and began writing full-time, publishing a number of short stories and several novels.
The culture of Ukraine is composed of the material and spiritual values of the Ukrainian people that has formed throughout the history of Ukraine. Strong family values and religion, alongside the traditions of Ukrainian embroidery and folk music are integral aspects of the country's culture. It is closely intertwined with ethnic studies about ethnic Ukrainians and Ukrainian historiography which is focused on the history of Kyiv and the region around it.
Nikolay Nikolayevich Nosov was a Soviet writer of children's literature, the author of a number of humorous short stories, a school novel, and the popular trilogy of fairy tale novels about the adventures of Dunno and his friends.
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.
A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian is a humorous novel by Marina Lewycka, first published in 2005 by Viking.
William Bickford (1774–1834) was an English inventor, who, formerly a currier, invented the safety fuse for use in mining.
Kozyn is a rural settlement in Obukhiv Raion of Kyiv Oblast (province) of Ukraine. It hosts the administration of Kozyn settlement hromada, one of the hromadas of Ukraine. Population: 3,536 .
Moysey (Moses) Abramovych Fishbein was an influential Ukrainian poet and translator of Jewish origin.
Andriy Andriyovych Biba is a retired Ukrainian football player and coach.
Andrey Nikolayevich Aleksanenkov is a former Russian professional footballer.
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.
Contemporary Ukrainian literature refers to Ukrainian literature since 1991, the year of both Ukrainian independence and the collapse of the Soviet Union. From that year on, censorship in the Soviet Union ceased to exist and writers were able to break openly with the official socialist realism style of art, music, and literature. Principal changes had taken place in Ukrainian literature already under Perestroika (1985) and especially after the Chernobyl disaster. Some researchers consider that modern Ukrainian literature was born during the 1970s and founded by Soviet dissidents from the sixties generation.
Andriy Yevheniiovych Biletsky is a Ukrainian far-right politician. He is the leader of political party National Corps. He was the first commander of the volunteer militia Azov Battalion, which he founded in 2014, and a co-founder of the nationalist movement Social-National Assembly. From 2014 until 2019, Biletsky was a People's Deputy of Ukraine.
Kaharlyk is a Ukrainian satirical dystopia novel by Oleg Shynkarenko, first published in hardcover by Serhii Pantiuk Publishing House in 2014. The novel depicts life in Ukraine a hundred years after the present time. Ukraine returned to the Middle Ages because of consequences of Russian occupation. The main character Olexandr Sahaidachny, whose mind was used for creation of Russian military satellites's supercomputers, is trying to get back his lost memory and wife. For this, he embarks on a mysterious city Kaharlyk, where time stopped after testing the newest Russian weapons.
Christopher Colin MacLehose CBE, Hon. FRSL is a British publisher notable as publisher of Harvill Press, where his successes included bringing out the stories of Raymond Carver and Richard Ford for the first time in Britain. Having published works translated from more than 34 languages, MacLehose has been referred to as "the champion of translated fiction" and as "British publishing's doyen of literature in translation". He is generally credited with introducing to an English-speaking readership the best-selling Swedish author Stieg Larsson and other prize-winning authors, among them Sergio De La Pava, who has described MacLehose as "an outsize figure literally and figuratively – that's an individual who has devoted his life to literature".
Andrey Adamovskiy – Ukrainian businessman and philanthropist. Honorary Academician of the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine.
Andriy Vasylyovych Taran is Ukraine's ambassador to Slovenia. He was the 16th Minister of Defence of Ukraine and before that a lieutenant general in the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
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.
Andrei Yakovlevich Kalina is a Ukraine-born Russian Paralympic swimmer who represented Ukraine from 2002 to 2013 and Russia since 2015.
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.
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