ELKOST International Literary Agency

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Oleg Pavlov

ELKOST INTL. Agency handles world translation rights in ALL TITLES by Oleg Pavlov

2012 Solzhenitsyn Prize (Russia)
Shortlisted for Russian National Literary Award ‘Big Book’ (2010, for Asystole)
Znamya Literary Magazine Prize (2009, for Asystole)
October Literary Magazine Prize (Best Fiction of the Year 1997, 2002);
Russian Booker Prize (2002,  for Commemoration in Karaganda);
Novy Mir Literary Magazine Prize (1995);
Russian Booker of the Decade nominee (2011, for Commemoration in Karaganda).

 

Oleg Palov (b. 1970 in Moscow) is a former Russian army conscript who now works in Moscow. Pavlov is said to be one of the most gifted examples of what has been dubbed the "renaissance in Russian literature."

He published his first novel Military Apologue in 1994 at the age of twenty four and was immediately acclaimed by the critics and by his colleagues, as well as by the Booker Prize committee, which in 1995 named Military Apologue among 6 best novels.

Military Apologue provides a graphic and chilling account of what it was like to serve as a front-line soldier in the remote Asiatic regions of the former Soviet Empire, in the tragic and absurd time of its dissolution. As a military conscript, Pavlov served in Karaganda as a prison guard, and there he witnessed all sorts of human degradation, faced humiliations and beatings; eventually a severe concussion brought him to the local mental hospital. He left the army at the age of twenty, diagnosed for 'mental instability' and the only job he could find was that of a janitor. He also had a strong feeling that the life he had left behind had to be analyzed and depicted.

His next novel was Matyushin's Case (1997).

Pavlov received the Russian Booker Prize in 2002 for his book "Ninth Day Party in Karaganda: or the Story of the Recent Days" (Karagandinskiye deviatiny).

Pavlov is the author of articles on literature, historical and social aspects of life in Russia, as well as numerous essays. In his 2003 book "The Russian man in the XX century" he writes about Russian life, not only based on his personal experience, but also on numerous letters received by the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Foundation in the early 1990s, and given to him by the famous Russian writer and dissident and his wife, Natalia.

Oleg Pavlov's personal webpage: http://www.opavlov.orc.ru/