The Modern Novel

Biography

Margarita Khemlin was born in 1960 in Chernihiv, Ukraine. Her father was a foreman and her mother a physiotherapy instructor. She studied at the Moscow Gorky Literary Institute , under the supervision of Lev Ozerov. After graduation, she did various jobs, including working for the Housing and Utilities Department, as a dishwasher, for the publisher of a magazine, a drama columnist, as a journalist and for a TV channel. Her first story was published in 1991 and she then published a collection of stories called The Jewess’s Farewell in a magazine. She published her first collection of stories in book form in 2008, which was short-listed for the Big Book prize, while her first novel was short-listed for the Russian Booker Prize. Her twin sister, Alla Mihailovna Tsitrinjak, is also a writer as is her husband, Vardvan Vartkesovich Varzhapetyan, who writes historical novels and translated the Torah into Russian. Margarita Khemlin died in 2015.

Other links

Margarita Khemlin
Margarita Khemlin
Obituary
Margarita Khemlin (in Russian)