Internationally acclaimed Ukrainian novelist and public intellectual Andrey Kurkov will discuss his work at 6:30 p.m. December 7 at the Austin Central. Kurkov will discuss Diary of an Invasion, a collection of his writings and broadcasts from Kyiv since the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
This event is free and open to the public.
Frequently called Ukraine’s most famous living writer, Kurkov has dedicated himself to chronicling and contextualizing Ukraine’s war with Russia for foreign audiences, making numerous public appearances and producing a stream of reports. He will be interviewed by Eurasia analyst Matthew Orr, and introduced by Mary Neuburger, Director of the Center for Russian, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies at University of Texas.
“I think everybody should do what he can do best for the country,” Kurkov told the New York Times in 2022. “What I can do is write and tell things, and that is what I am doing.”
Born near Leningrad in 1961, Andrey Kurkov was a journalist, prison warder, cameraman and screenplay-writer before he became well known as a novelist. He received “hundreds of rejections” and was a pioneer of self-publishing, selling more than 75,000 copies of his books in a single year. His novel Death and the Penguin, his first in English translation, became an international bestseller, translated into more than thirty languages. As well as writing fiction for adults and children, he has become known as a commentator and journalist on Ukraine for the international media. His work of reportage, Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev, was published in 2014, followed by the novel The Bickford Fuse (MacLehose Press, 2016). He lives in Kyiv with his British wife and their three children.
AtCentral is The Library Foundation’s cultural series featuring author events, performances, film screenings, cooking demos and art exhibitions at the Austin Central Library.