Vladimir Georgiyevich Sorokin (; born 7 August 1955) is a contemporary postmodern Russian writer and dramatist. He has been described as one of the most popular writers in modern Russian literature. Biography Sorokin was born on 7 August 1955 in Bykovo, Moscow Oblast, near Moscow. In 1972, he made his literary debut with a publication in the newspaper Za kadry neftyanikov (, For the workers in the petroleum industry). He studied at the Gubkin Russian State University of Oil and Gas in Moscow and graduated in 1977 as an engineer. After graduation, he worked for one year for the magazine Shift (, Smena), before he had to leave due to his refusal to become a member of the Komsomol. Throughout the 1970s, Sorokin participated in a number of art exhibitions and designed and illustrated nearly 50 books. Sorokin's development as a writer took place amidst painters and writers of the Moscow underground scene of the 1980s. In 1985, six of Sorokin's stories appeared in the Paris magazine A-Ya. In the same year, French publisher Syntaxe published his novel Ochered''' (The Queue). Sorokin is a devout Christian, having been baptized at the age of 25. Sorokin's works, examples of underground culture, were banned during the Soviet period. His first publication in the USSR appeared in November 1989, when the Riga-based Latvian magazine Rodnik (Spring) presented a group of Sorokin's stories. Soon after, his stories appeared in Russian literary miscellanies and magazines Tretya Modernizatsiya (The Third Modernization), Mitin Zhurnal (Mitya's Journal), Konets Veka (End of the Century), and Vestnik Novoy Literatury (Bulletin of the New Literature). In 1992, Russian publishing house Russlit published Sbornik Rasskazov (Collected Stories) – Sorokin's first book to be nominated for a Russian Booker Prize. Sorokin's early stories and novels are characterized by the combination of socialist-realist discourse with extreme physiological or absurd content; Sorokin himself has described his early writings as "little binary literary bombs made up of two incompatible parts: one socialist realist, and the other based on actual physiology, resulting in an explosion, and this gave me, the writer, a little spark of freedom." In September 2001, Vladimir Sorokin received the People's Booker Prize; two months later, he was presented with the Andrei Bely Prize for outstanding contributions to Russian literature. In 2002, there was a protest against his book , and he was investigated for pornography. Sorokin's books have been translated into English, Portuguese,