Ludmila Ulitskaya was born in 1943 in the Urals, graduated from Moscow University with a Degree of Master in Biology. She worked in the Institute of Genetics as a scientist.
Shortly before perestroika (1979/1982) she became Repertory Director of the Hebrew Theatre of Moscow and scriptwriter. She is an author of forteen fiction books (over 2 000 000 copies), of three tales for children and of six plays staged by a number of theatres in Russia and in Germany.

She is a winner of many Literary prizes, namely: Medici Award (1998, France), Penne Literary Prize (1998, Italy) and Giuseppe Acerbi Award (1998, Italy) for "Medea" novel; Booker Prize (Russia 2002) for "Kukotsky Case" novel ; Novel of the Year Prize (Russia 2004) for "Sincerely yours, Shurik" novel; Best writer of the Year Ivanushka Prize (Russia 2004); Penne Literary Prize (2006, Italy), National Olympia Prize of Russian Academy of Business (2007, Russia), Best Stage Play Award 2006 conferred by Moscow Culture Commitee for her piece "The White Elephant Year" (2007, Russia), National Literary Prize BIG BOOK (2007, Russia) for "Daniel Stein, Translator" novel, Grinzane Cavour Literary Award (2008, Italy) for "Sincerely Yours, Shurik"novel.

Ludmila Ulitskaya can be defined as one of the most profound and far-reaching writers of the contemporary Russian horizon. She made her first appearance on the literary stage as a Short Stories writer (1990-1999): several collections, published under various titles full of rich colour and psychological details. Some of those books were immediately translated abroad.
Then appeared "Sonya" ("Little Sonya" or else Soniechka - 1995) - a short novel appreciated worldwide. It is a continuation of the long-established Russian literary tradition of the narration of the life of a woman, understanding and forgiving, considering her life as a long loving service to her highly talented husband painter of international fame, who was interned in a Stalinist forced labour camp. It is a story of high emotional calibre with memorable plot. It is a true gem of modern Russian woman’s narrative.
"Medea and her children" (1996) was Ulitskaya’s first full-length novel. Here Ulitskaya passes towards the narration of big epochal changes and the narration becomes a saga about a life of family of Crimean citizens in three generations. This is a format that will characterize the whole further output of the writer comprising her latest production. The plot is rich with characters of different nationalities and extraction, all the secondary characters are written with microscopic wealth of detail, indicative of typical generosity of the writer. Every character is sculptured to a degree that most writers reserve only to their protagonists. Thus the reading becomes unique and unforgettable experience.
"Funeral Party", a novel published in 1997, is Ulitskaya’s universally acknowledged masterpiece. Here the writer’s attention is focused on the crucial point of every human being: on death. The plot is centred on the life and loves of an Russian émigré in New York in the beginning of the Nineties. The story tells us his love of New York, his numerous love affairs, some of which overlap, but all very real and sincere, describes his life in a shabby but very trendy Greenwich Village apartment, about his slow dying, his ironical attitude towards death and his own death in particular. It is a novel that combines a sad Jewish humour with rare capacity to unflinchingly gaze at the biggest problem of all, so often and so easily repressed by a man from the street. This gift of writing about the main questions of life places Ulitskaya into a more than centenary Russian tradition of vital writing as an heiress of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Dostoyevsky.
Her next novel "Kukotsky Case" (2001) on one hand continues a epoch-sweeping and saga-broad adventure that started with Medea, but on the other hand, enters for the first time the domain of altered states of the human consciousness focusing on the mechanisms of human memory and its mystery. One the main characters of the novel is an Alzheimer patient, a woman who continues to live both in the ordinary space-and-time dimension and in the state of altered consciousness where past, present and future are present in one eternal now and here. Reality and bardo state mingle in her mind and create an intriguing counterpoint between the actual plot full of very lively characters and action and its inner windy desert counterpart evolving the brain of the woman. The novel covers four decades and several epochs of Soviet and new Russian history ploughing through various strata of human mind, delving deep into subconscious. Surely it is one of the most rewarding and multilayered novels to appear in modern Russian literature.
The novel "Women Lies" (2002) consists of eight chapters, each with its own separate plot, where the main theme is the invention, creativeness or mythomaniac syndrome, an acute analysis of the what makes human imagination work, a writer insight into the mechanisms that stand at the basis of his own work almost to seem a scholarly essay disguised as lively and highly readable collection of short chapters.
The most popular novel "Sincerely yours, Shurik" published in 2004, an enormous success in Russia (sold 200 000 copies) and in France (30 000 copies sold). Her first novel completely dedicated to the theme of love in human relations. The central figure is a modern Casanova in disguise of a handsome Muscovite with a possessive widowed mother and an unassuming profession of an interpreter. This cultured young gentleman completely unable to say "no", partly due to his good manners, partly due to his desire to be a good boy, accumulates a conspicuous army of long time lovers, women of different age and social extraction, with every one of whom he has a particular exclusive relation that he is unable and unwilling to drop. His natural softness and a deep affection to his widowed mother keeps him forever vulnerable, reliable and ready to become yet another woman’s darling. Some of his relations end in a life-long love/friendship, others end in tragedy (the most desperate of his lovers commits suicide). Ulitskaya creates an character of eternally womanising modern male who by his own indecision finally ruins his life, because – the irony of the sort – the only woman he really cares for is unable to take him seriously, mistaking his gentleness for insipidity and lack of character.
Ulitskaya published four books for young readers, mostly bestiary wonder stories, written with geniality, joviality and with strong philosophical underplot.
In her new novel, Daniel Stein, Ludmila Ulitskaya as a mature master and in the best vein of Russian literary tradition finally feels herself ready to write a novel that poses an eternal moral question: what is good, where is the real virtue and comes to conclusion that the only touchstone of the what is good is acting good, while the religious beliefs and internal contradictions of each of us should be considered secondary to this main moral principle. The novel is at the same time a skilfully crafted literary roman epistolaire, a philosophical tale, a profound historical survey and an entertaining peace of fiction. It covers wide geographical areas – Germany, Israel, USA, Russia – and dramatic historical epochs - from second World War in Warsaw to modern Israel. It enters into deep historical detail: tragedy of Holocaust, the rise and fall of Communist doctrine and which is more important it gives a new reading to the role of Christianity. Far from being commonplace this novel breaks new ground and ventures boldly into a new literary spaces pulling down many established “rules” of literary form.
The book is construed as a patchwork of private histories recounted through letters of her characters, personal diaries, taped conversations and a liberal supply of official notes, interrogation reports, documents and quotations from letters of formal complaints to the authorities. The element that links all of theses sources, the core of this polyhedral narrative crystal, is the story of Daniel Stein, who himself possesses the very gift of bundling other people’s lives.