Andrey Kurkov

Andrey Kurkov is a Ukrainian novelist, screenwriter and essayist who has become one of the country's most internationally known writers. His novel Death and the Penguin — the darkly comic tale of a writer hired to pen obituaries of living people while caring for a pet penguin — made his name, and his many books have been translated into more than forty languages.

Kurkov was a journalist and war correspondent in the post-Soviet period, and his fiction mixes surrealism, black humour and the everyday absurdity of life in a collapsing union. Since 2014 he has been one of the most eloquent literary voices of Ukraine, writing essays and novels about war, memory and resilience.