Andrey Kurkov

Born Andrey Yuriyovych Kurkov on April 23, 1961, in Budogoshch, a village in the Leningrad region of Soviet Russia, he was the son of a military test pilot and a doctor. In 1963, when Khrushchev demobilised a hundred thousand officers, his father took a job at the Antonov aircraft factory in Kyiv, and the family settled in a two-room flat across the road from the airfield, where jet engines were tested through the night. He wrote his first poem at seven, about the loneliness of the last of his three hamsters. A boyhood collection of some 1,500 cacti led him to botanical Latin, then to Polish, then to Japanese, and in 1983 he graduated from the Kyiv Foreign Languages Institute as a Japanese translator. Steered away from a KGB listening unit, he served from 1985 to 1987 as a prison guard in Odesa, where he wrote nearly all of his children's stories. Through the 1980s he sent absurdist novels to Soviet publishers who liked them and could not print them, while friends copied his manuscripts illegally and he read them aloud in jazz clubs and private flats in Moscow and Leningrad. After the Soviet collapse he published himself, on food-wrapping paper bought from Kazakhstan, and by the end of the first year had sold 75,000 books through station kiosks and from a pavement pitch among the Russian-doll sellers. Death and the Penguin (1996), the story of a Kyiv obituary writer and his king penguin Misha, found a Swiss publisher in 1997 and an English one in 2001, and became an international bestseller. He has written mostly in Russian and since 2014 has also published in Ukrainian; his novels, among them The Bickford Fuse, Grey Bees and Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv, have been translated into some 37 languages, and Grey Bees won the Prix Médicis étranger in French in 2022. He was president of PEN Ukraine from 2018 to 2022, and lives in Kyiv with his wife, Elizabeth, and their three children.

When a chain of kiosks took 10,000 copies of his self-published books and never paid, Kurkov had a few hours to reclaim them and no transport. He persuaded the driver of a funeral bus to help, gave him vodka, and slept the night in the bus with the books. The driver reached his funeral the next morning.