Andriy Kurkov

Contemporary Ukrainian writer and one of the most interesting and famous figures of the modern Ukrainian literary process. All of Andrei Kurkov's books are distinguished by bright characters and absorbing, fascinating plots. Eight films were written by this writer, and in 2014 he was awarded the Order of the Legion of Honor of France.

He was born on April 23, 1961 in the village of The future of the Leningrad region (Russian Federation). Writer, journalist, screenwriter.

He has lived in Kyiv since early childhood. In 1983 he graduated from the Kyiv State Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages. From 1985 to 1987 he served as a security guard at the Odessa Correctional Colony З 51. He graduated from the School of Japanese Translators. He worked as an editor of the Dnipro publishing house, a screenwriter at the Dovzhenko film studio, and taught at Bell College (Cambridge, England). Since 1988 a member of the English PEN Club. Member of the Union of Cinematographers of Ukraine (since 1993) and the National Union of Writers (since 1994). In 1998 he became a member of the European Film Academy. Since 1998 he has been a permanent member of the jury of the Felix European Film Academy Award. In 2011 he was a member of the jury of the literary competition "Young Word".

He started writing in high school. He is currently the author of 13 novels and 5 children's books. More than 20 feature and documentary films have been directed by him. Kurkov is the only writer in the post-Soviet countries whose books are in the top ten European bestsellers. His most popular novel, Picnic on Ice, has sold 150,000 copies in Ukraine, more than any other book by any other contemporary Ukrainian writer. Kurkov's books have been translated into 36 languages.

The story "The last landing. A Brief History of an Internal Body "recalls the story of the disappearance in 1994 of Mykhailo Boychyshyn, the head of the People's Movement of Ukraine's secretariat. that Ukraine was not energy independent.

In early 2005, Andrei Kurkov became a persona non grata in Russia. The distribution of his books was stopped in Russia, and the connection with his Russian publishing house "Petersburg Writer" was severed. One of the possible reasons for this phenomenon, Andrei Kurkov, cites his statements in the press during the "Orange Revolution", in which he gave negative assessments of Russia's official policy and its interference in the 2004 Ukrainian elections. Since the end of the last millennium, all of Kurkov's works in Russian in Ukraine have been published by Folio Publishing House (Kharkiv). Since 2005, the entire "adult" A. Kurkov in Russia is published by the publishing house "Amphora" (St. Petersburg).