Requiem for a Soldier

Oleg Pavlov: Oleg Pavlov is one of the most highly-regarded Russian writers today. He has won the Russian Booker Prize (2002) and Solzhenitsyn Prize (2012) among many other awards. Born in Moscow in 1970, Pavlov spent his military service as a prison guard in Kazakhstan. Many of the incidents portrayed in his fiction were inspired by his experiences there: he recalls how he found himself reading about Karabas, the very camp he had worked at, in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, became Solzhenitsyn's secretary and was inspired to continue the great writer's work. Pavlov's writing is firmly in the tradition of great Russian novelists such as Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn.He was only 24 years old when his first novel, Captain of the Steppe, was published, receiving praise not only from critics but from the jury of the Russian Booker Prize, which shortlisted the novel for the 1995 award. Pavlov went on to win the Prize in 2002 with his next book, The Matiushin Case (English translation published in 2014 by And Other Stories). The Matiushin Case was the second novel in what would become the thematic trilogy set in the last days of the Soviet empire: Tales from the Last Days. All three works in the trilogy are stand-alone novels. The third book, Requiem for a Soldier, was published by And Other Stories in 2015.Anna Gunin has translated I am a Chechen! by German Sadulaev and The Sky Wept Fire by Mikail Eldin. Her translations of Pavel Bazhov's folk tales appear in Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov (Penguin Classics), shortlisted for the 2014 Rossica Prize. She has also translated poetry, plays and film scripts by Denis Osokin and Yuri Arabov.