Join the Menil Collection (Houston) and Inprint for a reading by the renowned Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov from his acclaimed novel, Grey Bees. Translated by Boris Dralyuk, Grey Bees received the 2022 Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize from the National Book Critics Circle. With his signature humor, Ukraine’s most famous novelist presents a balanced and illuminating portrait of modern conflict along the Russian border.
As always, Menil programs are free and open to all.
Born near Leningrad in 1961, Andrey Kurkov was a journalist, prison warder, camera operator, 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 30 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 most recent book Diary of an Invasion (Deep Vellum, 2023), a collection of Kurkov’s writings and broadcasts from Kyiv, is a remarkable record of a brilliant writer at the forefront of a 21st-century war, and his upcoming novel Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv, longlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize, will be published in the U.S. in April 2024. He lives in Kyiv with his British wife and their three children.