Loading...Come and talk to two of Russia’s most influential authors and brilliant word-smiths as they get to grips with the not untroubled current state of the Russian soul. Talk and Q&A, followed by drinks.
Andrei Gelasimov was born in Irkutsk in 1966. His second novel Thirst, about young men returning from the Chechen war, made him the most-read living Russian author in France on its translation in 2005. His novel Gods of the Steppe, about a teenage boy in the Far East befriending a Japanese prisoner of war in 1945, won the ‘National Bestseller’ prize in 2009. His latest book, Cold (2015), sees a worldly film director returning to his northern Russian home town from a life in western Europe and confronting buried truths about himself when dramatic power cuts force the whole town to cope with extreme cold.
Andrei Astvatsaturov: ‘Petersburg’s answer to Woody Allen’ is Associate Professor of the Department of the History of Foreign Literature at St Petersburg State University and Director of the literature programme at the Smolny College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. His novel People in the Nude(2009) was an immediate bestseller in Russia, and his second novel Skunkamera (2010), after Tsar Peter the Great’s Kunstkamera cabinet of curiosities, also dissects St Petersburg with sharp humour and affection.