Andrey Kurkov

Andrey Kurkov (born 1961 in Saint Petersburg) is a Ukrainian writer who works in both Russian and Ukrainian. His books combine black humour, the realities of post-Soviet life and touches of surrealism, and have made him one of the most widely read Ukrainian authors since the Soviet collapse, with translations into dozens of languages.

His mother was a doctor and his father a test pilot, and the family moved to Kyiv when he was small. He began writing at seven, after two of his three pet hamsters died, with a poem about the loneliness of the survivor. He trained as a Japanese translator, and during his military service he was assigned to work linked to the KGB and later to the police. While working as a prison guard in Odesa, he wrote most of his children's books and his best-known novel. His first novel came out two weeks before the fall of the Soviet Union. Amid the upheaval he started self-publishing, borrowing money from friends to set up an independent publishing house and selling copies across Ukraine, sometimes by hand from stalls on busy streets. He is said to have received around five hundred rejections before a publisher accepted his work, by which time he had written almost eight novels.

His novels blend satire with an everyday view of power and war. After Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022 he became an internally displaced person, but kept writing and speaking about the conflict. He has presided over PEN Ukraine since 2018. In a 2022 interview he suggested that the war might backfire on Moscow, encouraging more Ukrainian writers, including native Russian speakers, to publish in Ukrainian. His legacy lies in showing that Ukrainian literature can hold its own on the international market.