Vladimir Sorokin

Vladimir Sorokin (born 1955 in Bykovo, near Moscow) is one of the most widely read and debated writers in contemporary Russian literature. He works across novels, stories, plays and screenplays, and his books mix dystopia, science fiction, alternative history and the grotesque. His work has repeatedly become the subject of public controversy in Russia, including lawsuits.

Born on 7 August 1955, he began publishing in 1972, when a short piece appeared in a newspaper for oil workers. He studied at the Gubkin institute in Moscow and graduated as an engineer in 1977. After a year working for a magazine, he left the job rather than join the Komsomol, the Communist youth organisation. Through the 1970s he took part in art exhibitions and illustrated and designed nearly fifty books. His development as a writer unfolded among the painters and writers of the Moscow underground of the 1980s.

Sorokin is known for stylistic mimicry: he borrows the voice of socialist realism and of classic Russian prose, then fills it with physical or absurd material, producing a deliberate jolt. Totalitarianism, violence, power and social taboos recur across his work. His early texts circulated outside official channels until the late 1980s, when Soviet publishers began printing them. In 1992 his first book to be nominated for a Russian Booker Prize appeared. Later, his dystopian novel about a Russia ruled by a tsar in the Kremlin, cut off from its neighbours by a great wall, drew wide attention.

His legacy lies in his formal experiments and in the controversy he has provoked. His books have been translated into many languages. Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 he has lived in exile in Berlin, from where he has continued to criticise the Russian government.