Vladimir Sorokin

Vladimir Sorokin is a prolific contemporary Russian author of novels, plays, librettos, and screenplays. Born in 1955 in a small town near Moscow, he trained as an engineer before turning to art and writing. His work gained notoriety in the 1980s, and The Queue, his first novel, was published by famed émigré and well-known dissident Andrei Sinyavsky in France. His Collected Stories earned him a nomination for the Russian Booker Prize in 1992, and he received the Andrei Biely Award in 2001.