NINE
Page 26
NATALIA SMIRNOVA, born in 1962, grew up in the Siberian city of Yakutsk. She later moved to Yekaterinburg in the Urals where she studied language and literature and now teaches. Smirnova has published two collections of short stories and a novel, Businesswoman. Her prose is subtle and slightly fanciful while her cultivated heroines are trapped in the crude surroundings of drab, provincial lives.«The Women and the Shoemakers» won Smirnova a Fellowship from the Hawthornden International Writers' Retreat.
LUDMILA ULITSKAYA, born in 1942 and a geneticist by training, only began writing in the 1990s. «Ulitskaya's fresh, delicately sensual writing, full of the joys and pitfalls of every day, is a world away from the gloomy, fear-driven reflections on the plight of human beings under the Soviet heel,» The Observer wrote of Ulitskaya's first novel Sonechka (see GLAS 17). «With Ulitskaya, Russian fiction rediscovers a consoling and universal normality.» Sonechka was short-listed for the Russian Booker Prize, translated into 20 languages and awarded France's Medici Prize for foreign fiction. Her novels The FuneralParty and Medea and her Children were also shortlisted for the Russian Booker. Her novel The Kukotsky Case won the Russian Booker in 2002. The two pieces published here come from the cycle «Women's Lies» consisting of six novellas.