'' magazine in 2016 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 will be published in 2025. He is in the process of writing the third book
The Public Sauna Case. 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. ==Bibliography==