Andrey Kurkov

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Andrey Kurkov
Leningrad, USSR
NationalityUkrainian
EducationKyiv Foreign Languages Institute
OccupationWriter

Andrey Yuryevich Kurkov (

post-Soviet reality and elements of surrealism
.

Life and works

Kurkov on the cover of Culture and Life magazine in 2016

Kurkov's father was a test pilot and his mother was a doctor. When he was just 2 his family relocated to

Soviet education
at the time.

Having graduated in 1983 from the Kyiv Foreign Languages Institute, and as a trained Japanese translator Kurkov was assigned military service assisting the

Odessa.[3]
It was during this period that Kurkov wrote all of his children's stories.

His first novel was published two weeks before the

fall of the Soviet Union, and in the ensuing social and political turmoil he made the first steps towards self-publishing and distribution. Borrowing money from friends to fund his work, Kurkov managed to publish independently.[2] While organising distribution around Ukraine
, he would also sell copies by hand from stalls on busy streets.

Like many successful writers, Kurkov had difficulty getting his first publishing contract. He reportedly received 500 rejections before being accepted, in which time he had written almost eight complete novels.

Later in his career he won acclaim as one of the most successful Ukrainian authors in the

The Financial Times as "a sort of cross between The Pilgrim's Progress, Catch-22, Heart of Darkness and Cormac McCarthy's The Road, with a faint shading, here and there, of Samuel Beckett: an insistently dreamlike absurdist satire shaped by the vastness of Russia's landmass and the insanity of its Soviet-era ideology",[4] and reviewed by The Guardian as a "genre-defying work, fusing picaresque adventure with post-apocalyptic parable", while Kurkov himself called it "the dearest and most important of all my works".[5][6] He has been described by Ian Sansom as "a serious writer never more serious than when he's being funny about unfunny things, and with a whole lifetime of unfunny things to be serious about."[7]

In 2018 he was elected as the President of PEN Ukraine.[8]

Kurkov's novel

Prix Médicis étranger,[11] and into English by Boris Dralyuk, winning the inaugural Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize from the National Book Critics Circle.[12]

In 2024, Kurkov released The Silver Bone, the first in a new series of novels titled "The Kyiv Mysteries". The second book The Heart Is Not Meat will be published in 2025. He is in the process of writing the third book The Public Sauna Case.[13]

Kurkov lives in

2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, he became an internally displaced person and continued to write and broadcast about the war.[14] A bilingual, native Russian speaker, in a 2022 interview Kurkov speculated that Russia’s war on Ukraine, rather than suppress Ukrainian culture and identity, would potentially have the opposite effect, encouraging Ukrainian writers, especially those whose native language is Russian, to publish increasingly, or even exclusively, in Ukrainian.[15]

Bibliography

Novels translated to English
Book name ISBN[16] Publication year
Death and the Penguin 2001
Penguin Lost 2005
A Matter of Death and Life 2005
The Penguin Novels 2006
The Case of the General's Thumb 2009
The World of Mr Big Forehead
The President's Last Love 2009
The Good Angel of Death 2010
The Milkman in the Night 2011
The Gardener from Ochakov 2013
The Bickford Fuse 2016
Grey Bees 2020
Diary from an Invasion 2022
Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv 2023[17]
The Silver Bone 2024[18]
For children

Non-fiction:

References

  1. ^ Vannek, Ludmila (7 April 2013). "Radio Liberty interview with Andrey Kurkov". Radiosvoboda.org. Retrieved 1 October 2015.
  2. ^ a b c Nicholas Wroe (30 July 2011). "A life in books: Andrey Kurkov". The Guardian. Retrieved 21 October 2015.
  3. ^
    The Hindu Business Line
    . Retrieved 13 March 2022.
  4. ^ Leith, Sam (29 April 2016). "'The Bickford Fuse', by Andrey Kurkov". Financial Times. Retrieved 16 February 2019.
  5. ^ Taplin, Phoebe (13 May 2016). "The Bickford Fuse by Andrey Kurkov review – a Soviet Pilgrim's Progress". The Guardian. Retrieved 16 February 2019.
  6. ^ Dickinson, Charlie (May 2017). "The Bickford Fuse by Andrey Kurkov". hackwriters.com | The International Writers Magazine. Retrieved 13 March 2022.
  7. ^ Sansom, Ian (14 May 2016). "Andrey Kurkov's The Bickford Fuse is a satirical masterpiece". The Spectator. Retrieved 16 February 2019.
  8. ^ "Andrii Kurkov – PEN Ukraine's New President". Pen.org.ua. 17 December 2018. Archived from the original on 30 January 2019. Retrieved 29 January 2019.
  9. TLS
    . Retrieved 13 March 2022.
  10. ^ "Grey Bees". Hachette.
  11. ^ Lépine, Elise (8 November 2022). "Prix Médicis étranger – Andreï Kourkov récompensé pour Les Abeilles grises". Le Point (in French). Retrieved 11 November 2022.
  12. ^ "Announcing the 2022 NBCC Award Winners".
  13. ^ "The Silver Bone by Andrey Kurkov – droll detective work in revolutionary Kyiv". The Guardian. Retrieved 27 March 2024.
  14. ^ "Letter from Ukraine". BBC Radio 4. Retrieved 13 March 2022.
  15. ^ Brown, Jeffrey (11 April 2022). "Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov on preserving his country's culture during war". PBS.org/newshour. PBS. Retrieved 15 April 2022.
  16. ^ "About us". Penguin.co.uk. Retrieved 16 February 2019.
  17. ^ https://www.maclehosepress.com/titles/andrey-kurkov/jimi-hendrix-live-in-lviv/9781529427820/
  18. ^ https://www.maclehosepress.com/titles/andrey-kurkov/the-silver-bone/9781529426496/

External links