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 warder 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.

An ebullient black comedy... Reminiscent of the best Soviet dissident literature Daily Telegraph Kurkov received universal praise for his debut novel Death and the Penguin-Kurkov's latest is better Time Out Full of touches of grim insight and tactful surrealism, with just enough of the absurd to suggest a cross between John le Carre's Smiley and Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita -- John Burnside Scotland on Sunday Kurkov is a fine satirist and a real, blackly comic. Observer Kurkov flips from mock-tragedy to comedy and back again, planting the ominous and the absurd neatly among deadpan descriptions of a daily life in denial The Times

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 warder 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.

An ebullient black comedy... Reminiscent of the best Soviet dissident literature Daily Telegraph Kurkov received universal praise for his debut novel Death and the Penguin-Kurkov's latest is better Time Out Full of touches of grim insight and tactful surrealism, with just enough of the absurd to suggest a cross between John le Carre's Smiley and Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita -- John Burnside Scotland on Sunday Kurkov is a fine satirist and a real, blackly comic. Observer Kurkov flips from mock-tragedy to comedy and back again, planting the ominous and the absurd neatly among deadpan descriptions of a daily life in denial The Times