José Manuel Prieto was born in Havana in 1962. He has lived in Mexico City since 1995. His novel Livadia was published in English in 2001 as Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire. Prieto has translated poems by Anna Akhmatova, and Josef Brodsky, as well as prose by Andre Platonov, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Vladimir Nabokov. In 2002, he published El tartamudo y la rusa and Treinta días en Moscú. That same year he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. This year he is a Fellow at the New York Public Library's Center for Scholars and Writers.
