Andrey Kurkov

Andrii Yuriyovych Kurkov (, ; born 23 April 1961) is a Ukrainian author and public intellectual who writes in Russian and Ukrainian. He is the author of 19 novels, including the bestselling Death and the Penguin, nine books for children, and about 20 documentary, fiction and TV movie scripts. His work is currently translated into 37 languages, including English, Spanish, Japanese, French, German, Italian, Chinese, Swedish, Persian and Hebrew, and published in 65 countries. Kurkov, who has long been a respected commentator on Ukraine for the international media, notably in Europe and the United States, has written assorted articles for various publications worldwide. His books are full of black humour, post-Soviet reality and elements of surrealism.

Life and works

Kurkov's father was a test pilot and his mother was a doctor. When he was just 2 his family relocated to Kyiv in connection with his father's work. He started writing at the age of seven when, after the death of two of his three pet hamsters, he wrote a poem about the loneliness of the remaining pet. He also produced poetry about Lenin, purportedly inspired by his Soviet education at the time.

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

In 2018, he was elected as the President of PEN Ukraine.

Kurkov's novel Grey Bees, which has "elements of both the fable and the epic", dramatises the conflict in his country through the adventures of a beekeeper. The novel was translated into French by Paul Lequesne as Les abeilles grises, which won the 2022 Prix Médicis étranger, and into English by Boris Dralyuk, winning the inaugural Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize from the National Book Critics Circle.

In 2024 Kurkov released The Silver Bone, the first in a new series of detective novels titled "The Kyiv Mysteries". The second book, The Stolen Heart, was published in 2025. The third book, Lost Soldiers, appeared in 2026.

Kurkov lives in Kyiv with his English wife, Elizabeth, and their three children. After the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, he became an internally displaced person and continued to write and broadcast about the war. 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.