The War's Unwomanly Face, Alexieyevich's first book, detailed the lives of Soviet women who fought in WWII (pilots, parachutists, snipers) while The Last Witnesses looked at that war's children. Boys in Zinc (1989) addressed the problem of post-traumatic-stress syndrome in veterans of the Soviet-Afghan war. Enchanted by Death (1993) focused on those driven to suicide by the collapse of the Soviet Union and their socialist illusions. 1997 saw the publication of Alexiyevich's requiem for the victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, The Chernobyl Prayer. All of Alexiyevich's books grapple with the question: «Who are we and what country do we live in now?»
Her latest book, The Wonderful Deer of the Eternal Hunt, is a series of Russian love stories while «Landscape of Loneliness» excerpts three female voices from the book.
MARIA ARBATOVA, born in 1957, holds degrees from Moscow University (Philosophy) and the Literary Institute (Drama). An award-winning writer and dramatist as well as an outspoken feminist, she has been hailed as «Russia's Erica Jong». Her best-selling books include: My Name is Woman (published last year in France), A Visit from a Middle-aged Lady, Mobile Affairs, Reading Plays.
Her latest book, Farewell to the 20th Century, is a revised and supplemented version of her autobiographical novel I'm Forty (published in 1998 and excerpted in GLAS 13, A Will and a Way).
NINA GORLANOVA, born in 1947, grew up in the Siberian city of Perm where she lives still and where most of her stories and novels are set. By returning to one and the same place, she creates a somewhat fantastic world populated with curious characters and possessing its own mythology. The life in her invented Perm is squalid but merry, risky but indestructible. Gorlanova's short novel Love in Rubber Gloves won first prize at the International Competition for Women's Prose. Her Learning a Lesson was short-listed for the Russian Booker Prize (1996).
ANASTASIA GOSTEVA, born in 1975, a graduate of Moscow University (Physics), belongs to the first generation to come of age in post-Soviet Russia and to travel freely beyond it. She works in Moscow as a journalist and translator while writing poetry and prose. Her Samurai's Daughter won the Znamya prize for Best Debut Novel of 1997. Next came Travel Agnus Dei (1998) and a number of short stories in leading literary journals. Her latest novel, The Den of the Enlightened, looks at modern-day love affairs conducted over the Internet.
LUDMILA PETRUSHEVSKAYA, born in 1938, is the author of The Time: Night, short-listed for the Russian Booker Prize and translated into over 20 languages. In 2002, for life-time achievement Petrushevskaya received Russia's most prestigious prize The Triumph. Petrushevskaya's rather eccentric style — her black humor and over-the-back-fence style — is often described as critical realism mixed with postmodernism and elements of the absurd. In Petrushevskaya's stories even the most unpalatable reality is made beautiful by the perfection of her art. The author of Immortal Love (also widely translated), On the Way to Eros, The Mystery of the House, Real-life Tales, and Find Me, Sleep, Petrushevskaya has been called «one of Russia's finest living writers». (See also her «Fairytales for Grownups» in Glas 13, A Will and a Way.)
MARGARITA SHARAPOVA, born in 1962, graduated from the Cinema Institute and then the Literary Institute. As a writer of short stories, she draws on her past life as a circus animal trainer and often uses the road as a connecting element. Her heroes are circus performers, gypsies, would-be writers, alcoholics and vagabonds. Driven by their emotions, a personal sense of duty and determination to preserve their inner freedom, they live their hand-to-mouth lives as best they can. Sharapova has won a number of prizes, including those of the Moscow Writers' Union and the International Democracy Foundation.
OLGA SLAVNIKOVA, born in 1957, grew up in Yekaterinburg in the Urals where she majored in journalism. A literary editor and critic, Slavnikova is the author of three widely acclaimed novels: A Dragonfly the Size of a Dog, short-listed for the Russian Booker Prize (1997); Alone in the Mirror, short-listed for the Anti-Booker and winner of the Pavel Bazhov Prize; and Immortal, awarded the Critics' Academy Apollon Grigoriev Prize and short-listed for both the Belkin Prize and the National Bestseller Prize. «Krylov's Childhood» is the first section of Slavnikova's new novel, Period.
NATALIA SMIRNOVA, born in 1962, grew up in the Siberian city of Yakutsk. She later moved to Yekaterinburg in the Urals where she studied language and literature and now teaches. Smirnova has published two collections of short stories and a novel, Businesswoman. Her prose is subtle and slightly fanciful while her cultivated heroines are trapped in the crude surroundings of drab, provincial lives.
«The Women and the Shoemakers» won Smirnova a Fellowship from the Hawthornden International Writers' Retreat.
LUDMILA ULITSKAYA, born in 1942 and a geneticist by training, only began writing in the 1990s. «Ulitskaya's fresh, delicately sensual writing, full of the joys and pitfalls of every day, is a world away from the gloomy, fear-driven reflections on the plight of human beings under the Soviet heel,» The Observer wrote of Ulitskaya's first novel Sonechka (see GLAS 17). «With Ulitskaya, Russian fiction rediscovers a consoling and universal normality.» Sonechka was short-listed for the Russian Booker Prize, translated into 20 languages and awarded France's Medici Prize for foreign fiction. Her novels The FuneralParty and Medea and her Children were also shortlisted for the Russian Booker. Her novel The Kukotsky Case won the Russian Booker in 2002. The two pieces published here come from the cycle «Women's Lies» consisting of six novellas.