Boris Akunin

Boris Akunin is a member of the “Real Russia”* organization (*the organization has been included by the Russian Ministry of Justice in the register of foreign agents) and has been added by Rosfinmonitoring to the list of terrorists and extremists.

On 13.01.2024, he was entered by the Russian Ministry of Justice into the register of media outlets and individuals performing the functions of a foreign agent.

Boris Akunin is one of the pseudonyms of Grigory Shalvovich Chkhartishvili.

Russian writer, literary scholar, translator, and Japanologist. He also publishes his fiction under the pseudonyms Anna Borisova and Anatoly Brusnikin.

Grigory Chkhartishvili was born on May 20, 1956, in Georgia, into the family of artillery officer Shalva Chkhartishvili and Russian language and literature teacher Berta Isaakovna Brazinskaya (1923–2007). In 1958, the family moved to Moscow. In 1973, he graduated from Secondary English School No. 36. He graduated from the Department of History and Philology of the Institute of Asian and African Studies (Moscow State University), with a degree in history and Japanese studies. He worked as a literary translator from Japanese and English. Chkhartishvili translated works by Japanese authors Yukio Mishima, Kenji Maruyama, Yasushi Inoue, Masahiko Shimada, Kobo Abe, Shinichi Hoshi, Takeshi Kaiko, Shohei Ooka, as well as representatives of American and English literature (Corgessan Boyle, Malcolm Bradbury, Peter Ustinov, etc.).

He worked as deputy editor-in-chief of the magazine Inostrannaya Literatura (Foreign Literature) (1994–2000), was editor-in-chief of the 20-volume Anthology of Japanese Literature, and chaired the board of the mega-project Pushkin Library (the Soros Foundation).

Since 1998, Grigory Chkhartishvili has been writing fiction under the pseudonym “Boris Akunin.” The Japanese word “akunin” (Jap. 悪人) does not have an adequate