Shishkin splits his time between Moscow and Zurich. His work is allusive, dense, and strikingly beautiful. His latest novel, Letter-Book, won the Russian Big Book prize in 2011. ISBN 9781934824368 Mikhail Shishkin has been publishing in Russia to acclaim and accolades for almost twenty years. In addition to winning Le prix du meilleur livre étranger (2005), he has won the Russian Booker Prize (2000) following its publication in Russia in 2005, Maidenhair was awarded both the National Bestseller Prize and the Big Book prize, and in 2011 it was awarded the Preis des Hauses der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. His novels have been translated into twenty-five languages. In 1995, he moved to Switzerland, where he worked as a Russian and German translator for asylum seekers. Translated from the Russian by Marian SchwartzĪbout the Author: Mikhail Shishkin has worked as a school teacher and a journalist. It bravely takes on the eternal questions-of truth and fiction, of time and timelessness, of love and war, of Death and the Word-and is a movingly luminescent expression of the pain of life and its uncountable joys.

Mikhail Shishkin’s Maidenhair is an instant classic of Russian literature. These stories of escape, war, and violence intermingle with the interpreter’s own reading: a history of an ancient Persian war letters sent to his son “Nebuchadnezzasaurus,” ruler of a distant, imaginary childhood empire and the diaries of a Russian singer who lived through Russia’s wars and revolutions in the early part of the twentieth century, and eventually saw the Soviet Union’s dissolution. Day after day the Russian asylum-seekers sit across from the interpreter and Peter-the Swiss officers who guard the gates to paradise-and tell of the atrocities they’ve suffered, or that they’ve invented, or heard from someone else.

Maidenhair by Mikhail Shishkin