Viktor Pelevin

Born in Moscow in 1962, Pelevin trained as an electrical engineer at the Moscow Power Engineering Institute before drifting into translation work and then literature at the Gorky Institute, publishing his first strange, genre-blurring short fiction just as the Soviet Union was collapsing around him.

Omon Ra, in 1992, made his reputation with its vision of the Soviet space program as an elaborate murderous fraud, and he followed it with a rapid succession of novels fusing Buddhist philosophy, advertising, video games, and psychedelic experience, including Generation P and Chapayev and Void, each one reading the post-Soviet chaos as a hallucination with rules of its own.

He became equally known for near-total personal invisibility, refusing interviews, publicity photos, and public appearances for decades and communicating with readers almost exclusively through fiction, which he has continued to publish at a nearly yearly pace ever since.