Ludmila Ulitskaya

Ulitskaya trained as a geneticist and worked at Moscow's Institute of General Genetics until she was dismissed in the 1970s for typing and circulating samizdat at her desk, an episode that ended her scientific career and pushed her toward writing. She spent years afterward on children's plays and film scripts before her first fiction collection appeared, and she was already in her fifties when international recognition arrived.

Daniel Stein, Interpreter, her documentary-collage novel built from letters and testimony, reconstructs the real life of a Jewish Holocaust survivor who became a Catholic priest after working undercover as a Gestapo interpreter to save Jews and Poles. The Kukotsky Enigma, following a Moscow doctor across decades of Soviet medicine and morality, won her the Russian Booker Prize in 2001, and The Big Green Tent extended the same patient documentary instinct to three friends navigating dissent and compromise.

An outspoken critic of Putin who opposed the annexation of Crimea for years before the wider invasion, Ulitskaya left Russia for Berlin in 2022, and her books were subsequently restricted at home.