Oleg Yermakov is a Russian writer. He was born in Smolensk in 1961, and worked in a forest reserve near Lake Baikal before doing his military service during the war in Afghanistan. His experiences formed the basis of an acclaimed collection of short stories, titled Afghan Stories (1991). He followed up with a novel, The Mark of the Beast (1994) which was nominated for the Russian Booker Prize. His war writing has been compared to that of Tolstoy and the literature of the Vietnam War.