Elena Chudinova

Elena Petrovna Chudinova (; born 3 September 1959) is a Russian writer, poet, publicist, and playwright.

Biography

Elena Chudinova was born in Moscow in the family of paleontologists Petr Konstantinovich Chudinov and his wife Inna Ivanovna Chudinova. According to her own admission, she started writing Russian history-themed poetry in 1970, but published a small part of it for the first time only in 2013 as an appendix to her novel Keeper of the Sign. Chudinova is the author of the novels Keeper of the Sign, written before the perestroika about the Russian Civil War, Nefert about ancient Egypt, the historical fantasy trilogy about the Saburov Russian-French noble family (Jewelry Box, Fleur-de-lis, and December Without Christmas), children's books A History of England for Children and Gardarika, and the play The Comedy of an Inkwell about the times of Catherine the Great.

Her most famous work is the 2005 dystopian novel The Notre Dame de Paris Mosque, which generated a great deal of worldwide controversy. The novel was awarded the annual Bastkon prize for science fiction in 2006 by the Russian literary group Bastion. The Notre Dame de Paris Mosque was published in France, Serbia, Poland, Bulgaria, and as a pirated version in Turkey. It was also translated into English and Norwegian and is awaiting publication in the United States. The novel was the target of criticism by Muslims and liberals and seized a wide popularity in the conservative circles of France.

As a publicist, Chudinova published four anthologies of articles dealing with politics and culture. She was a columnist for the Russian Expert magazine in 2007-2012. From 2010 to the present, she hosts her own weekly program called Author's Hour on Russian Orthodox Christian Radonezh radio.