Andrey Kurkov was born near Leningrad in 1961, and graduated from Kyiv Pedagogical Academy of Foreign Languages in 1983. After working as a prison guard in Odesa and as a journalist, he self-published his writing and found renown as a novelist. His most recent novel, Grey Bees, tells the story of a lone beekeeper as he navigates the conflict in Eastern Ukraine after the Russian annexation of Crimea. His novel Death and the Penguin, his first in English translation, is an international bestseller translated into more than thirty languages, and has been in print since its publication in 2001. Since the beginning of the Russian invasion, the author has issued unrivalled reports from his war-torn country in newspapers and magazines all over the world. Not only has he been a regular presence on radio and television, including BBC Radio 4's Letter from Ukraine, but he has travelled far and wide to lecture on the perilous state of his country. He has, in the process, become a crucial voice the people of Ukraine. His work of reportage, Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev, was published in 2014, followed by Diary of an Invasion in 2022.