Oleg Zaionchkovsky
Genres
Contemporary Fiction
Biography
Oleg Zaionchkovsky was born in Samara in 1959, the distant descendant of a famous Russian noble family. He spent all his adult life, until a recent move to Moscow, in the small town of Khotkovo, near the capital, working as a test engineer in an factory making rocket engines. He has been writing since childhood, but it is only recently that his work has been published, after he returned to writing at his wife's insistence.
His first two books, the short story collection Sergeev and The Town and the novel Petrovich both came out in 2004: they delighted readers with their depiction of everyday life in an ordinary Russian town, told in a strong realist style reminiscent of the Russian classics. Sergeev and the Town reached the shortlist for The National Bestseller and Russian Booker Prizes in 2004, while Petrovich made the longlist for the latter. Zaionchkovsky's latest novel, Happiness is Possible: A Novel of Our Time is, like Petrovich, a novel constructed from a sequence of novellas; in beautiful, unpretentious Russian it depicts the quiet joys that can be found in contemporary life. It was nominated for the Big Book Prize for 2010.
Prizes and awards
| 2010 | Shortlisted for The Russian Booker Prize (Happiness is Possible: A Novel of Our Time / Счастье возможно: Роман нашего времени) |
| 2010 | Shortlisted or The Big Book Prize (Happiness is Possible: A Novel of Our Time / Счастье возможно: Роман нашего времени) |
| 2005 | Shortlisted for The National Bestseller (Sergeev and the Town / Сергеев и городок) |
| 2004 | Shortlisted for Russian Booker Prize (Sergeev and the Town / Сергеев и городок) |
Books
- Happiness is Possible: A Novel of Our Time / Счастье возможно: Роман нашего времени, OGI, 2009
- Selected Works / Собрание сочинений, 2007
- Walks in the Park / Прогулки в парке, OGI, 2006
- Petrovich / Петрович, OGI, 2005
- Sergeev and the Town / Сергеев и городок, OGI, 2004