Andrei Kurkov

Edition 2019

(Leningrad, 1961). He began to write at the age of seven when two of his three hamsters died and he decided to dedicate a poem about loneliness to the survivor. In that era, as a result of his Soviet education, he still dedicated texts to Lenin. He worked as a Japanese translator for the KGB and was a prison warden in Odessa, where he wrote his first children´s works. He is the author of twenty novels, several children´s books and he has created numerous documentaries, his work has been translated into thirty languages. An expert on the post-Soviet world, he comments on reality in Ukraine for media outlets around the world. ‘Death and the Penguin’, an international best seller reissued by Blackie Books in 2018, mixes black humour and the post-Soviet milieu. So too does ‘The Gardener from Ochakov’, the second book by Kurkov, recently published by the same publisher.