Biography

Lyudmila Evgenyevna Ulitskaya (Russian: Людмила Евгеньевна Улицкая, born February 21, 1943) is an internationally acclaimed modern Russian novelist and short-story writer who, in 2014, was awarded the prestigious Austrian State Prize for European Literature for her oeuvre. In 2006 she published Daniel Stein, Interpreter (Даниэль Штайн, переводчик), a novel dealing with the Holocaust and the need for reconciliation between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Ulitskaya herself belongs to a group of people formed by the realities of the former Soviet Union, who see themselves ethnically and culturally as Jews, while having adopted Christianity as their religion. She won the 2012 Park Kyong-ni Prize. Ulitskaya was born in the town of Davlekanovo in Bashkiria but her family moved to Moscow when she was nine months old. In Moscow, her family lived in communal apartments with many other families. After childhood, she received a degree in genetics from the Moscow State University. After university, she worked for two years at the Institute of General Genetics, before she was fired in 1970 for reading and distributing samizdat literature. After this, she didn't work for about nine years. In this time she was married and then had two kids. Then Ulitskaya began her literary career by joining the Jewish drama theatre as a literary consultant in 1979. She became the Repertory Director of the Hebrew Theatre of Moscow. Her first published short fiction appeared in 1990. The story of her acclaimed novel Sonechka was first published in Novy Mir in 1992. In 1993, she published her first novel with Gallimard in France. Her first novel in Russian was published in 1994. Today, Ulitskaya divides her time between Moscow and Israel.