Biography

Andrei Georgiyevich Bitov (Russian: Андре́й Гео́ргиевич Би́тов, 27 May 1937 – 3 December 2018) was a prominent Russian writer of Circassian ancestry. Bitov was born in Leningrad. His father was an architect and his mother was a lawyer. He completed his secondary education in 1954 and began writing two years later. In 1957, he became a student at the Leningrad Mining Institute. While there, he joined a literary association for young writers led by Gleb Semyonov. He also served with a building battalion in the north and graduated in 1962.

He then began writing poetry and short, absurdist stories which were not published until the 1990s. In 1965, he became a member of the Union of Soviet Writers. By 1978, he had published ten works, but his now best known work, Pushkin House, had to be published in the United States and did not appear in the USSR until two years after the beginning of Perestroika.

In 1988, he was one of the founders of the Russian PEN Club and was its President beginning in 1991. He also taught at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute.

He received an award from Oktyabr magazine for his story Something with love... in 2013. This was followed in 2014 by the Government Award of the Russian Federation for culture and, in 2015, he was awarded the Platonov Prize. In 2018, he received the Order of Friendship. He died in Moscow.