Ilya Odegov is a writer and composer. His first novel, The Sound of the Sunrise, won the Best Modern Kazakhstan Novel prize in 2002.  His prose is published in the largest literary journals of Kazakhstan and Russia. His collections of short stories Alien Life (2008) and Runaways (2010) were nominated for and awarded, respectively, the Russian Prize, and his collection Any Love (2011) won the Maximilian Voloshin Prize. He is the founder of the creative association Fopajaro and lives and works in Almaty, Kazakhstan.