Oleg Pavlov was a prominent Russian writer and winner of the Russian Booker Prize. He was only 24 years old when his first novel, Captain of the Steppe, was published, receiving praise not only from critics but from the jury of the Russian Booker Prize, which shortlisted the novel for the 1995 award. Pavlov went on to win the Prize in 2002 with his next book, The Matiushin Case. The Matiushin Case was the second novel in what would become the thematic trilogy set in the last days of the Soviet empire: Tales from the Last Days. All three works in the trilogy are stand-alone novels. The third book, Requiem for a Soldier, was published by And Other Stories in 2015.
Life
Born in Moscow in 1970, Pavlov spent his military service as a prison guard in Kazakhstan. Many of the incidents portrayed in his fiction were inspired by his experiences there. During his service, Pavlov suffered a head injury, was hospitalised, and spent over a month in a psychiatric ward. This allowed him to be released from the army before the end of the mandatory two-year military service. He went on to study at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow.
Work
He was only 24 years old when his first novel, Captain of the Steppe, was published, receiving praise not only from critics but also from the jury of the Russian Booker Prize, which shortlisted the novel for the 1995 award. Pavlov went on to win the Prize in 2002 with his next book, the second novel in what would become the trilogy Tales from the Last Days. Pavlov was also the author of articles on literature and historical and social aspects of life in Russia, as well as numerous essays. In his 2003 book "The Russian Man in the 20th Century", he wrote about Russian life, not only based on his personal experience, but also on numerous letters received from the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Foundation in the early 1990s, which were given to him by the famous Russian writer and dissident and his wife, Natalia. Oleg Pavlov is said to be one of the most gifted examples of what has been dubbed the "renaissance in Russian literature." Captain of the Steppe has been translated into English by Ian Appleby and published by independent London publisher And Other Stories in 2013.
