Kazakhstan, officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is a landlocked country mostly in Central Asia, with a part in Eastern Europe. It borders Russia to the north and west, China to the east, Kyrgyzstan to the southeast, Uzbekistan to the south, and Turkmenistan to the southwest, with a coastline along the Caspian Sea. Its capital is Astana, while the largest city and leading cultural and commercial hub is Almaty. Kazakhstan is the world's ninth-largest country by land area and the largest landlocked country. It has a population of 20 million and one of the lowest population densities in the world, at fewer than 6 people per square kilometre. Ethnic Kazakhs constitute a majority, while ethnic Russians form a significant minority. Officially secular, Kazakhstan is a Muslim-majority country, although ethnic Russians in the country form a sizeable Christian community.
Almaty, formerly known as Alma-Ata, is the largest city in Kazakhstan, with a population of over two million. It was the capital of Kazakhstan from 1929 to 1936, while the country was an autonomous republic of the Soviet Union, then from 1936 to 1991, a union republic and finally from 1991, an independent state. In 1997, the government relocated the capital to Akmola.
Victor Olegovich Pelevin is a Russian fiction writer. His novels include Omon Ra (1992), The Life of Insects (1993), Chapayev and Void (1996), and Generation P (1999). He is a laureate of multiple literary awards including the Russian Little Booker Prize (1993) and the Russian National Bestseller (2004), the former for the short story collection The Blue Lantern (1991). His books are multi-layered postmodernist texts fusing elements of pop culture and esoteric philosophies while carrying conventions of the science fiction genre. Some critics relate his prose to the New Sincerity literary movement.
Dinmukhamed Akhmetuly "Dimash" Kunaev was a Kazakh Soviet communist politician who served as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Kazakh SSR.
Monique T.D. Truong is a Vietnamese American writer living in Brooklyn, New York. She graduated from Yale University and Columbia University School of Law. She has written multiple books, and her first novel, The Book of Salt, was published by Houghton-Mifflin in 2003. It was a national bestseller, and was awarded the 2003 Bard Fiction Prize, the Stonewall Book Award-Barbara Gittings Literature Award. She has also written Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose, along with Barbara Tran and Luu Truong Khoi, and numerous essays and works of short fiction.
Oleg Pavlov was a prominent Russian writer and winner of the Russian Booker Prize.
The 1,520 mm broad gauge Trans-Aral Railway was built in 1906 connecting Kinel and Tashkent, then both in the Russian Empire. For the first part of the 20th century it was the only railway connection between European Russia and Central Asia.
Mukhtar Omarkhanuli Auezov was a Kazakh writer, a social activist, a Doctor of Philology, and an honored academician of the Soviet Union (1946).
Lyudmila Stefanovna Petrushevskaya is a Russian writer, novelist and playwright. She began her career writing short stories and plays, which were often censored by the Soviet government, and following perestroika, published a number of well-respected works of prose.
Mikhail Pavlovich Shishkin is a Russian-Swiss writer and the only author to have won the Russian Booker Prize (2000), the Russian National Bestseller (2005), and the Big Book Prize (2010). His books have been translated into 30 languages. He also writes in German.
Marat Aldangaruly Sarsembaev is a Kazakh doctor of law and professor. He has won a range of international awards for his work.
The Eurasian Development Bank (EDB) is an international development finance institution investing in the development of the economies, trade and other economic ties, and integration in Eurasian countries. The EDB was founded in 2006 and is headquartered in Almaty, Kazakhstan. The Bank has a branch in St. Petersburg and representative offices in Astana, Bishkek, Dushanbe, Yerevan, Minsk, and Moscow.
Hadaa Sendoo is a Mongolian poet and translator. He founded and established the World Poetry Almanac in 2006. His early poetry was influenced by the Mongolian epic, Russian imagist poetry, and Italian hermetic poetry of the 20th century.
Leonid Abramovich Yuzefovich is a Russian writer known for the series of crime fiction stories taking place in pre-Revolution Russian Empire. He also writes non-fiction books about history, and currently adapts his stories for TV serials.
Bauyrzhan Momyshuly, also spelled Baurjan Momish-Uli was a Kazakh-Soviet military officer and author, posthumously awarded with the titles Hero of the Soviet Union and People's Hero of Kazakhstan.
Basketball Club "BC" Almaty is a Kazakhstani professional basketball club based in the city of Almaty in southern Kazakhstan.
Mikhail Yuryevich Elizarov – is a modern Russian writer and singer-songwriter, laureate of the Russian Booker Prize in 2008 for the novel The Librarian.
Rustam Khalfin was a Kazakh contemporary artist, painter and architect.
Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai is a Vietnamese poet and novelist. She is the author of twelve books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction in Vietnamese and English. She started her writing career with poetry in Vietnamese and has been honored with some of the top literary awards in Vietnam including the Poetry of the Year 2010 Award from the Hanoi Writers Association, First Prize, the Poetry about 1,000 Years Hanoi, as well as the Capital's Arts & Literature Award. Her debut novel, and first book written in English, The Mountains Sing, was released in 2020. The novel is a fictional family saga that gives voice to rarely documented historical events. The book has become an international bestseller, and was runner-up for the 2021 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, winner of the 2020 BookBrowse Best Debut Award, the 2021 International Book Awards, the 2021 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, and the 2020 Lannan Literary Award Fellowship for Fiction. Quế Mai's writing has been translated into twenty languages and has appeared in major publications including the New York Times. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from Lancaster University. She was named by Forbes Vietnam as one of 20 inspiring women of 2021. Her second novel written in English, Dust Child, was released in March 2023.
Vasily Nikolaevich Popov is a Russian painter, poet, and interpreter. He is a member of the Union of Writers of Russia, where he serves as Secretary of the board of directors. He is a recipient of the Bunin Award, the Lermontov Award, and the Grand Prix of the Golden Knight Literary Forum. As a painter, he is believed to be the first painter to have one of his works launched into space; the painting was simultaneously published on the Internet as an NFT.
