Natalia Rubanova lives and works in Moscow, Russia. She studied piano at the Ryazan Musical College in the 1990s, and received her bachelor’s from Moscow Pedagogical State University. She has published four books and written a great deal more, and her short stories have been published in over sixty anthologies in Russia, Finland, Germany, Greece, and the United States. Her plays have been performed in Russia, and most recently in London at the SOLO International Festival, where she was awarded the prize for Best New Writing. In 2019 she was awarded the Turgenev Prize (Moscow) for her short story “Don’t Cry, It Doesn’t Matter,” and the Hemingway Prize (Toronto) for her cycle of critical journalism articles.