Andrey Kurkov

The son of a doctor and a pilot, Andrey Kurkov trained as a Japanese translator and began writing novels while serving as a prison guard in Odesa. His novel Grey Bees, which he wrote after meeting refugees in Kyiv who made regular trips to the Donbas to deliver medicine, depicts the 2014 war through the perspective of a beekeeper. “For Ukrainians, freedom is more important than stability,” Kurkov said in an interview in 2022. “For Russians, it is the opposite. Ukrainians change their presidents at each election, Russians keep their tsar until the tsar is dead.”