Olga Slavnikova's third novel, The Man Who Couldn't Die, which won her the Apollon Grigoriev Prize and was short-listed for both the Belkin Prize and the National Bestseller Prize, has been published in French (Gallimard) and Italian (Einaudi) translation.
A novelist and critic, Olga Slavnikova was born in Sverdlovsk (now Ekaterinburg), in the Urals. She began publishing fiction in the late 1980s, during which time she was also fiction editor, then managing editor, of the literary magazine Urals. During perestroika, she started her own book business and then ran Book Club, a weekly with a circulation of 35,000 published in Ekaterinburg.
Slavnikova has lived and worked in Moscow since 2001. She is General Director of the Debut Independent Literary Prize, which was founded by Pokolenie, a private foundation, for authors under twenty-five writing in Russian. Annually, the Debut Prize receives 30,000-50,000 entries from every region of Russia, the former Soviet republics, virtually every country in Europe, as well as from the United States, Israel, Brazil, India, Japan, and other countries. The Debut Prize is the largest and most influential Russian effort to work with young writers. Since 2005, the Debut Prize has been run with the official support of the Russian Federation's Presidential Administration.
Olga Slavnikova is a member of the Union of Russian Writers, the Russian PEN Center, and the Russian Booker Committee. She has been the recipient of the prestigious Apollon Grigoriev Prize, the Polonsky Prize, the Bazhov Prize, and the Russian Booker Prize. She has also been a finalist for the Booker Prize, the Anti-Booker Prize, the National Bestseller Prize, and the Belkin Prize for best Russian novella.