Andrey Kurkov

A Ukrainian writer in the Russian language and president of PEN Ukraine, he has published more than 25 books. After a period of assisting the KGB as a translator of Japanese, and working as a prison guard in Odessa, where he wrote his first books for children, he is presently one of Ukraine’s leading writers, known for his personal trademark use of gallows humour and an ability to capture the post-Soviet milieu in Ukraine. He began to self-publish his work shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union and also took over distribution of the books around the country. In 1994 he published his most widely acclaimed novel Death and the Penguin (in Spanish, Muerte con pingüino, Blackie Books, 2017) which soon became a bestseller and was translated into more than thirty languages. His The Gardener from Ochakov, 2010 (in Spanish as El jardinero de Ochákov, Blackie Books, 2019) a dark satire about nostalgia amongst Russians and Ukrainians for the Soviet past. His articles have been published in media outlets including The Guardian and Eldiario.es. His most recent novel, Grey Bees, 2021 (in Spanish Abejas grises, Alfaguara, 2022), tells the story of a beekeeper who lives in the so-called Grey Zone of the country, which is to say the villages and towns of Donbas that have been caught on the battlefront since 2014. His books have been banned in Russia for almost ten years and after the invasion of Ukraine he had to flee from Kyiv.