Born near Leningrad in 1961, Andrey Kurkov was a journalist, prison warder, cameraman and screenwriter before he became well-known as a novelist.
After ‘hundreds of rejections’, Kurkov became a successful pioneer of self-publishing, selling more than 75,000 copies of his books in a single year. His novel Death and the Penguin, his first in English translation, became an international bestseller, translated into more than thirty languages.
As well as writing fiction for adults and children, Kurkov has become known as a commentator and journalist on Ukraine for the international media. His work of reportage, Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev, was published in 2014, followed by the novel The Bickford Fuse (2016). He lives in Kiev with his British wife and their three children.
Andrey Kurkov was a judge for the International Booker Prize 2009. His novel Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2023.
The escapades of Andrey Kurkov’s loveable eccentrics provide a frame for an intriguing portrait of Lviv in the 2000s, a melancholy borderland city that finds itself recalling a troubled past as it sits on the cusp of an uncertain future.
— The International Booker Prize 2023 panel of judges on 'Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv'
