Vladimir Kozlov

Vladimir Kozlov was born in Mogilev, an industrial city in what was then the Belarussian Soviet Socialist Republic and is now the country of Belarus. He spent his childhood and adolescence on the suburbs of that city, witnessing the collapse of the Soviet empire and a bizarre mix of unbridled freedom, wild capitalism and rampant crime in the early 1990s before moving to Minsk and later to Moscow. Kozlov has a dozen of fiction and non-fiction books to his name, many of which have been shortlisted or long-listed for major book prizes. He is the winner of the prestigious Made in Russia award in the Literature category (2013) and was nominated for GQ Russia's Writer of the Year in 2011 and 2012. Kozlov's novels and short stories have been published in translation in the US, France, Serbia and Slovakia. He debuted as a film director in 2013 and has since made five indie features and one feature-length documentary.