The Modern Novel

Biography

Andrey Kurkov was born in 1961 in Budogoshch, near Leningrad. His father was a test pilot and his mother a doctor. He first started writing as a child, a poem on the death of two of his pet hamsters. The family moved to Kyiv when he was still a child. He graduated from the Kyiv Foreign Languages Institute and trained as a Japanese translator. He then worked as an editor. He did his military service, first working for the KGB and then the military police. While working in Odessa, he wrote children’s stories. He published his first novel two weeks before the fall of the Soviet Union. Because of the chaos, he self-published and sold his books around Ukraine. He had already written eight novels and received 500 rejections before getting his first publishing contract. As well as writing novels and stories he has written many screenplays. He writes in his native language, Russian, and criticises the fact Russian is not recognised as an official language in Ukraine.

Other links

His Twitter page
Andrey Kurkov
A life in books: Andrey Kurkov
Articles by Andrey Kurkov that appeared in the New Statesman
Interview
Andrey Kurkov: dispatches from a country under siege
Ukrainian writer Andrey Kurkov: ‘I felt guilty writing fiction in a time of war’