My Generation's Experience and Literature
Writer, philologist, 20th century Russian literature expert, Rector (Gorky Literary Institute), member of the Culture Committee with the Office of the President of the Russian Federation.
Born in Moscow, Russia. Currently resides in Moscow.
Graduated from Moscow State University with a degree in philology.
Career years - 1987 to present day.
Varlamov’s fiction debut was the short story Cockroaches, published in Oktyabr magazine in 1987. His first book, A House in Ostozh, came out in 1990. He became famous for his novel Sucker and even more so after winning the Antibooker prize for his novella Birth.
Varlamov is the biographer of Grigory Rasputin, Mikhail Bulgakov, Andrei Platonov, Alexander Green, Vasily Shukshin, Aleksei Tolstoy, and Mikhail Prishvin. His biography of Aleksei Tolstoy won him the prestigious Big Book award and the Solzhenitsyn Prize, “For the subtle tracing through fiction of the strength and delicacy of the human soul and its fate in the modern world; for a conceptualisation of the paths of Russian literature in the 20th century via the medium of writers’ biographies.” He has also been awarded the Patriarch's Cyril and Methodius Literary Prize, the Leipzig literary club’s Lege Artis Prize, and the Student Booker (for his book The Wolf of Thought). Varlamov’s works have been translated into German, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Bulgarian, Chinese, Vietnamese and other languages.
