Vladimir Sorokin

Born in 1955 near Moscow, Sorokin trained as a mechanical engineer at the Gubkin Oil and Gas Institute before drifting into Moscow's underground conceptualist art scene, working as a book illustrator while writing transgressive fiction that had no chance of official publication and circulated instead through samizdat and émigré presses abroad from the late 1970s onward.

He became a lightning rod for controversy once his work could finally appear openly at home: a Kremlin-aligned youth group publicly shredded copies of his novel Blue Lard outside the Bolshoi Theatre in 2002 and filed pornography charges over a scene involving Stalin and Khrushchev, charges eventually dropped but widely read as a warning shot from the new Russia.

He kept producing dystopian fiction, including Day of the Oprichnik, imagining a restored czarist-fascist secret-police state, work that has only looked more prophetic with time. He publicly condemned Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine and left the country, now living largely in Berlin.