Ludmilla Petrushevskaya was born in Moscow in 1938. Her stories and plays were blacklisted by the Soviets until perestroika. Since then, two of her novels have been shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize and she has been acknowledged as a “living classic” in her homeland.
One of the founders of the “new women’s prose” movement, that also includes Tatyana Tolstaya and Ludmila Ulitskaya, she has produced work in a range of genres, with an emphasis most recently on magical stories based in contemporary Russian realities. Her works translated into English include There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories (2013), and There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children Until They Moved Back In (2014), both published by Penguin Books.
