Roman Senchin

Roman Valeryevich Senchin was born in 1971 in the city of Kyzyl, the capital of the Tuvan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (now the Republic of Tuva). His parents were office workers, now forced to lead a peasant way of life. After graduating from secondary school, he went to Leningrad, studied at a vocational construction school, and then served in the border troops in Karelia. In 1993, because of ethnic tensions, he moved with his parents from Kyzyl to the south of Krasnoyarsk Krai, to the village of Vostochnoye (Minusinsky District); he periodically lived in the nearby cities of Minusinsk and Abakan. He worked as a stagehand and a guard in a drama theater, as a night watchman, and as a janitor. In 1995–1996, Senchin’s stories were published in newspapers and magazines in Kyzyl, Minusinsk, and Abakan: Kommunist Tuvy, Nadezhda, Abakan, Strezhen, Siberian Meridian, and Yuzhno-Sibirsky Vestnik. In 1996, he entered the Gorky Literary Institute, joining A. E. Rekemchuk’s prose workshop. He graduated from the institute in 2001. His stories and novellas have been published in the weekly Literaturnaya Rossiya and in the magazines Znamya, Oktyabr, Nash Sovremennik, Novy Mir, Druzhba Narodov, Mir Severa, Literaturnaya Ucheba, Koltso A, Kontinent, Den i Noch, Sibirskie Ogni, Turkic World, and Moskovsky Vestnik, as well as in the almanacs Litos and Aprel and the collective collections Weather for Tomorrow, New Writers, and Prologue. He took part in the playwrights’ festival in Lyubimovka (1997), the meeting of young writers in Peredelkino (1999), the Forum of Young Writers in Lipki (2001–2006), the German-Russian writers’ workshop in Berlin (2002), and the film festival Literature and Cinema in Gatchina (2003). The novella Minus was translated into German and published as a separate book by DuMont in 2003. In August 2008, Minus was published in English by Glas