Ludmila Ulitskaya

Included by the Russian Ministry of Justice on 01.03.2024 in the register of mass media outlets and individuals performing the functions of a foreign agent.

Ludmila Yevgenyevna Ulitskaya (b. 21.02.1943, Davlekanovo, Bashkiria) is a Russian writer. Wife of sculptor Andrei Krasulin.

Occupation: Writer and screenwriter
Years active: Since the late 1980s

Ludmila Ulitskaya was born in Bashkiria, where her family had been evacuated during the war. After the war, the Ulitskys returned to Moscow, where Ludmila finished school and then graduated from the biology department of Moscow State University. For two years, Ludmila Yevgenyevna worked at the Institute of General Genetics of the USSR Academy of Sciences, from where she was dismissed in 1970 for reprinting samizdat materials. Since then, Ulitskaya has, by her own account, never held a government job: she worked as literary manager of the Chamber Jewish Musical Theater, wrote essays, children’s plays, scripts for radio, children’s and puppet theaters, reviewed plays, and translated poetry from Mongolian. Ulitskaya began publishing her stories in magazines in the late 1980s, and fame came to her after the films “Little Misses Liberty” (1990, directed by Vladimir Grammatikov) and “A Woman for Everyone” (1991, directed by Anatoly Masheko) were made from her screenplay, and after the novella “Sonechka” was published in Novy Mir (1992). In 1994, this work was recognized in France as the best translated book of the year and brought the author the prestigious French Médicis Prize. Also in France, the first book by Ludmila Ulitskaya, the collection Poor Relatives (1993), was published in French.

Ludmila Yevgenyevna’s works have been translated into twenty-five languages. Literary scholars call her prose “prose of nuances,” noting that “the subtlest manifestations of human nature and the details of everyday life are rendered by her with particular care. Her novellas and short stories are imbued with a very special worldview that