Vladimir Sorokin

Sorokin was born on 7 August 1955 in Bykovo, Moscow Oblast, near Moscow. In 1972, he made his literary debut with a publication in the newspaper Za kadry neftyanikov (Russian: За кадры нефтяников, For the workers in the petroleum industry). He studied at the Gubkin Institute of Oil and Gas in Moscow and graduated in 1977 as an engineer.

After graduation, he worked for one year for the magazine Shift (Russian: Смена, Smena), before he had to leave due to his refusal to become a member of the Komsomol.

Throughout the 1970s, Sorokin participated in a number of art exhibitions and designed and illustrated nearly 50 books. Sorokin's development as a writer took place amidst painters and writers of the Moscow underground scene of the 1980s. In 1985, six of Sorokin's stories appeared in the Paris magazine A-Ya. In the same year, French publisher Syntaxe published his novel Ochered' (The Queue).

Sorokin is a devout Christian, having been baptized at the age of 25.[3]

Sorokin's works, bright and striking examples of underground culture, were banned during the Soviet period. His first publication in the USSR appeared in November 1989, when the Riga-based Latvian magazine Rodnik (Spring) presented a group of Sorokin's stories. Soon after, his stories appeared in Russian literary miscellanies and magazines Tretya Modernizatsiya (The Third Modernization), Mitin Zhurnal (Mitya's Journal), Konets Veka (End of the Century), and Vestnik Novoy Literatury (Bulletin of the New Literature). In 1992, Russian publishing house Russlit published Sbornik Rasskazov (Collected Stories) – Sorokin's first book to be nominated for a Russian Booker Prize.[4] In September 2001, Vladimir Sorokin received the People's Booker Prize; two months later, he was presented with the Andrei Bely Prize for outstanding contributions to Russian literature. In 2002, there was a protest against his book Blue Lard, and he was investigated for pornography.[5]

Sorokin's books have been translated into English, Portuguese, Spanish, French, German, Dutch, Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Italian, Polish, Japanese, Serbian, Korean, Romanian, Estonian, Slovak, Czech, Hungarian, Croatian and Slovenian, and are available through a number of prominent publishing houses, including Gallimard, Fischer, DuMont, BV Berlin, Haffman, Mlinarec & Plavic and Verlag der Autoren.

His 2006 novel, Day of the Oprichnik, describes a dystopian Russia in 2027, with a Tzar in the Kremlin, a Russian language with numerous Chinese expressions, and a "Great Russian Wall" separating the country from its neighbors.[6][7][8] He was awarded in 2015 the Premio Gregor von Rezzori for this novel.[9]

In 2016 he was accused by pro-Kremlin activists of "extremism", "pro-cannibalism themes" and "going against Russian Orthodox values" in his 2000 short story Nastya, the contents of which concern a 16-year-old being cooked alive in an oven and eaten by her family and friends.[10][11]

In December 2019, Russian filmmaker Ilya Belov released the documentary "Sorokin Trip" [12] in which he portrayed and examined the writer's life and work.

• Official Webpage.
• Full bibliography (in Russian).
• Vladimir Sorokin at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Vladimir Sorokin at IMDb.
• "Russia Is Slipping Back into an Authoritarian Empire", interview to Der Spiegel, 2 February 2007.
• "The Wait: On Vladimir Sorokin", The Nation, Elaine Blair, 25 March 2009
• "Ice by Vladimir Sorokin", Bookslut, February 2007
• Kalfus, Ken (15 April 2007). "They Had a Hammer". The New York Times.
• "Ice Trilogy by Vladimir Sorokin", nthWORD Magazine Shorts, Ryan O'Connor, July 2011