in 2016 by MacLehose Press) was characterised by Sam Leith in The Financial Times as "a sort of cross between The Pilgrim's Progress, Catch-22, Heart of Darkness and Cormac McCarthy's The Road, with a faint shading, here and there, of Samuel Beckett: an insistently dreamlike absurdist satire shaped by the vastness of Russia's landmass and the insanity of its Soviet-era ideology", 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 most recently translated 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. 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 Novels translated to English For children The Adventures of Baby Vacuum Cleaner Gosha Why No One Pets The Hedgehog illustrator: Tania Goryushina, , 2012. Non-fiction: Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev, , 2014 References External links ABC National Radio - A recent interview The Ukrainian Observer: Andrey Kurkov: Ukraine's Literary Success Freedom Lecture: Andrey Kurkov @ De Balie, Amsterdam 1961 births 21st-century Ukrainian writers Living people Writers from Kyiv Ukrainian male writers Ukrainian writers Ukrainian writers in Russian Prix Médicis étranger winners Ukrainian novelists