Andrey Kurkov

Photo: Valentyn Kuzan

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Translated into more than thirty languages and read across some sixty-five countries, Andrey Kurkov is one of the most internationally recognized Ukrainian novelists writing today – and one of very few authors to have judged the International Booker Prize International Booker Prize (2009) before later being nominated for it himself.

His breakthrough novel, Death and the Penguin (1996), in which a struggling writer inherits a depressed zoo penguin and is drawn into Kyiv's criminal underworld, remains one of the most widely read work of contemporary Ukrainian fiction abroad. Grey Bees (2018) – following a beekeeper who is one of the last two residents of a village caught between opposing front lines in eastern Ukraine – won France's Prix Médicis (2022) and the inaugural National Book Critics Circle translation prize (2023) in the US. Its 2024 film adaptation premiered in competition at the Rotterdam International Film Festival Rotterdam International Film Festival. Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv (2012) and The Silver Bone (2024), the first in his detective series set in 1919 Kyiv, were longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2023 and 2024. A new screen adaptation of Death and the Penguin is in development starring Oscar nominee Maria Bakalova, with a further novel being adapted by Oscar-winning director Ari Folman. 

Since Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Kurkov has become one of the country's most trusted eyewitness voices abroad, turning his diaries of daily life under attack – Diary of an Invasion (2023), Our Daily War (2024), Three Years on Fire (2025) – into some of the most decorated non-fiction to come out of the war: the Orwell Foundation named him its 2026 Special Prize recipient, an honour that followed France's Prix Transfuge in 2025, and, in the war's first year alone, Iceland's Halldór Laxness International Literary Prize, Germany's Geschwister-Scholl-Preis, and Index on Censorship's Freedom of Expression Award.