Andrey Kurkov was born in St Petersburg in 1961. Having graduated from the Kiev Foreign Languages Institute, he worked for some time as a journalist, did his military service as a prison warden in Odessa, then became a film cameraman, writer of screenplays and author of critically acclaimed and popular novels, including the cult bestseller Death and the Penguin.
Andrey Kurkov will appear during the Riveting Reads: Russian Literature Today event on 3 August at British Library, alongside Boris Akunin, Alisa Ganieva and Zinovy Zinik.