Andrey Kurkov

14th April 2022

Andrey Kurkov is a Ukrainian novelist and an independent thinker who writes in both Russian and Ukrainian.

He was born near St Petersburg in Russia. His father was a test pilot and his mother a doctor. When he was just two his family relocated to Kyiv for 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, supposedly inspired by his Soviet education at the time.

Having graduated in 1983 from the Kyiv Foreign Languages Institute, and as a trained Japanese translator, he was assigned military service assisting the KGB. However, he managed to get his papers changed to serve with the military police. This offered him a greater degree of freedom during and after his service period. He was assigned as a prison guard based in Odessa. 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 in 1989, 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. 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. 

In his subsequent career, he has won acclaim as one of the most successful Ukrainian writers in the post-Soviet era and has featured on many European bestseller lists. His novel The Bickford Fuse (published in 2009 in Russian, and in Boris Dralyuk’s English-language translation in 2016 by MacLehose Press) was characterised by Sam Leith in 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”. It was reviewed by The Guardian as a “genre-defying work, fusing picaresque adventure with post-apocalyptic parable”. 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”.

Kurkov’s 2020 novel, Grey Bees, which has “elements of both the fable and the epic”, dramatises the conflict in his country post the invasion of Crimea through the adventures of a beekeeper. It was one of my absolute favourites of that year.

As well as being an author, Kurkov also works as a commentator for Western media. He lived in Kyiv with his English wife, Elizabeth, and their three children until the end of February this year. After the recent Russian invasion, he and his family relocated to Lviv in the west of the country.

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