★Awards: The Russian Decameron Prize! Nominated for Apollon Grigoryev Literary Prize! Hawthornden Fellowship 2002 to the translator for the English translation of the Vital Needs of the Dead!
★Rights sold: France, Germany!
★What needs might the dead have? Our loved ones stay with us after they’ve gone. Love, death and memory breathe in unison in the first novel by Igor Sakhnovsky.

　　A boy is growing up in a small Soviet town beyond the Urals. There is a person in his life whose unobtrusive devotion will stay with him and see him through all hardships.

　　This semi-biographical story of ‘sentimental education’ of a young man in a Russian province chronicles his life from childhood to university years, with his first love, to an older woman, his attempt to break out of the provincial morass and the choices he has to make. The book leaves the reader sensing that there is ‘nothing more terrifying, beautiful and fantastical than the socalled real life’ as the author puts it.

　　The book was highly acclaimed in Russia and firmly established Igor Sakhnovsky as one of the brightest literary voices in Russia today.

Igor Sakhnovski

　　Igor Sakhnovski was born in 1958 in Orsk. He studied Russian language and literature at the State University of the Urals, then worked as a literary consultant and editor for a number of publishers and magazines. He is co-founder of the weekly newspaper Book Club. His book the Happy and the Mad, incorporating the novel the Vital Needs of the Dead and short stories, won the 2003 Russian Decameron prize. The Man Who Knew Everything was short-listed for the National Bestseller Prize, and although it was not awarded the first prize, it was the absolute winner according to readers’ polls. His novel the Vital Needs of the Dead has been translated into English, German, and French. Sakhnovski is also the author of two books of poems.