Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was a Russian writer. A prominent Soviet dissident, Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of communism and helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union, in particular the Gulag system.
Russian literature refers to the literature of Russia and its émigrés and to Russian-language literature. The roots of Russian literature can be traced to the Middle Ages, when epics and chronicles in Old East Slavic were composed. By the Age of Enlightenment, literature had grown in importance, and from the early 1830s, Russian literature underwent an astounding golden age in poetry, prose and drama. Romanticism permitted a flowering of poetic talent: Vasily Zhukovsky and later his protégé Alexander Pushkin came to the fore. Prose was flourishing as well. Mikhail Lermontov was one of the most important poets and novelists. The first great Russian novelist was Nikolai Gogol. Then came Ivan Turgenev, who mastered both short stories and novels. Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy soon became internationally renowned. Other important figures of Russian realism were Ivan Goncharov, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin and Nikolai Leskov. In the second half of the century Anton Chekhov excelled in short stories and became a leading dramatist. The beginning of the 20th century ranks as the Silver Age of Russian poetry. The poets most often associated with the "Silver Age" are Konstantin Balmont, Valery Bryusov, Alexander Blok, Anna Akhmatova, Nikolay Gumilyov, Sergei Yesenin, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Marina Tsvetaeva. This era produced some first-rate novelists and short-story writers, such as Aleksandr Kuprin and Nobel Prize winners Ivan Bunin, Leonid Andreyev, Fyodor Sologub, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Alexander Belyaev, Andrei Bely and Maxim Gorky.
Leonid Nikolaievich Andreyev was a Russian playwright, novelist and short-story writer, who is considered to be a father of Expressionism in Russian literature. He is regarded as one of the most talented and prolific representatives of the Silver Age literary period. Andreyev's style combines the elements of realist, naturalist, and symbolist schools in literature. Of his 25 plays, his 1915 play He Who Gets Slapped is regarded as his finest achievement.
Michael Austin Stackpole is an American science fiction and fantasy author best known for his Star Wars and BattleTech books. He was born in Wausau, Wisconsin, but raised in Vermont. He has a BA in history from the University of Vermont. From 1977 on, he worked as a designer of role-playing games for various gaming companies, and wrote dozens of magazine articles with limited distribution within the industry. He lives in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Urban fantasy is a subgenre of fantasy, placing supernatural elements in an approximation of a contemporary urban setting. The combination provides the writer with quixotic plot-drivers, unusual character traits, and a platform for classic fantasy tropes, without demanding the creation of an entirely-imagined world.
Vladimir Nikolayevich Voinovich, was a Russian writer and former Soviet dissident, and the "first genuine comic writer" produced by the Soviet system. Among his most well-known works are the satirical epic The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin and the dystopian Moscow 2042. He was forced into exile and stripped of his citizenship by Soviet authorities in 1980 but later rehabilitated and moved back to Moscow in 1990. After the fall of the Soviet Union, he continued to be an outspoken critic of Russian politics under the rule of Vladimir Putin.
Sergei Vasilyevich Lukyanenko is a Russian science fiction and fantasy author, writing in Russian. His works often feature intense action-packed plots, interwoven with the moral dilemma of keeping one's humanity while being strong. Some of his works have been adapted into film productions, for which he wrote the screenplays.
Michelle Michiko Sagara is a Canadian author of fantasy literature, active since the early 1990s. She has published as Michelle Sagara, as Michelle West and as Michelle Sagara West. Sagara has received two nominations for the John W. Campbell Award.
Moscow Aviation Institute (National Research University) (MAI; Russian: Московский авиационный институт, МАИ) is one of the major engineering institutes in Moscow, Russia. Since its inception MAI has been spearheading advances in aerospace technology both within Russia and worldwide. The university laid emphasis on laboratory instruction in applied science and engineering, specific to the demands of aerospace industry.
William Edmund Butterworth III, better known by his pen name W. E. B. Griffin, was an American writer of military and detective fiction with 59 novels in seven series published under that name. Twenty-one of those books were co-written with his son, William E Butterworth IV. He also published under 11 other pseudonyms and three versions of his real name.
Graham Diamond is an author who writes across multiple genres, including fantasy and science fiction. He has published twenty novels with more than a million copies of his books in print.
Yuri Aleksandrovich Nikitin is a Russian writer of science fiction, historical fiction, and Slavic fantasy.
Abdul Hameed was an Urdu fiction writer from Pakistan. He was also known for writing a popular children's TV play Ainak Wala Jin (1993) for Pakistan Television Corporation which was broadcast on PTV during the mid-1990s. In 1997, he was awarded Pride of Performance by the Government of Pakistan.
Eksmo is one of the largest publishing houses in Russia. Eksmo and AST together publish approximately 30% of all Russian books.
Feliks Solomonovich Kandel is a Russian Jewish writer, residing in Jerusalem, Israel.
Ekaterina Sedia is a Russian fantasy writer. She immigrated to the United States and attended college in New Jersey to obtain her Ph.D. Her most famous work is The Alchemy of Stone, a steampunk novel that examines sexism and class bigotry. Sedia's other novels include The Secret History of Moscow, According to Crow, Heart of Iron, and The House of Discarded Dreams. She has also written several short fiction stories, poems, and nonfiction books, as well as edited anthologies of short stories. Several of her publications have been nominated for awards and/or have made a well-known reading list. In addition, Sedia was the editor for Jigsaw Nation and the World Fantasy Award-winning Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy. In addition to writing, she teaches ecology and evolution courses as a professor at Stockton University in Galloway, New Jersey.
Science fiction and fantasy 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, such as Andrei Tarkovsky, also produced many 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.
Elizabeth Tudor (Элизабет Тюдор; full name Lala Elizabeth Tudor Hassenberg, also known as Lala Hasanova, is an Azerbaijani-Russian science fiction writer and lawyer of Jewish ancestry.
The Aelita Award is an award for science fiction writers founded by the Union of Writers of the Russian Federation and "Uralsky Sledopyt Magazine" in 1981. It was named after the classic Russian science fiction novel Aelita. The prize is awarded during the Aelita, a Soviet/Russian science fiction fandom convention.
Laboratoria Fantastiki, or FantLab, is a Russian website dedicated to science fiction and fantasy literature. It was founded in 2004 by Alexei Lvov.
