Evgeny Vodolazkin wrote Laurus — a novel about a medieval Russian saint — and it turned out to be exactly what contemporary fiction had been missing. Not postmodernism, not social realism, but something else: slow, serious, concerned with the soul.
Born in Kyiv in 1964, he is a medievalist by training, a specialist in Old Russian literature, and works at Pushkin House in St. Petersburg. His first novel, Solovyov and Larionov, passed almost unnoticed. Laurus (2012) won the Big Book award and has been translated into twenty languages.
The Aviator (2016): a man wakes in 1999 with no idea who he is — and proves to have been frozen since the 1930s. Brisbane (2018): a guitarist loses the ability to play.
His prose is slow, like icon painting. Every word has been weighed.