Yana Vagner

Yana Wagner was born in Moscow in 1973, into a bilingual family. Wagner is her mother’s surname; her mother came to the Soviet Union in the late 1960s from Czechoslovakia to study the Russian language and literature. She graduated from the Russian State University for the Humanities and worked for some time as an English translator and radio announcer. For more than ten years she was engaged in transport logistics, which allowed her to travel in Africa, Europe, and Latin America. She lived in Moscow all her life and now lives near Zvenigorod with her husband, son, and three dogs.

Her debut novel, "Vongozero," was nominated at once for two major literary awards, the National Bestseller and NOS, has been translated into 11 languages, and a screen adaptation is in preparation. The novel "Alive People" was nominated for the National Bestseller Award in 2014.