Andrei Ivanov

Andrei Ivanov was born in Estonia in 1971 and grew up in “a typical Russian working-class family”. Although he sees himself as part of the Russian literary tradition, he identifies Estonia as his home country and his creative point of departure. Having graduated from Tallinn University as a Russian philologist and written his thesis on the language of Vladimir Nabokov, Ivanov briefly worked as a teacher, travelled to Scandinavia and explored Denmark for a number of years living in a hippy commune. His Russian-language novels, Hanuman’s Travels (2009), Bizarre (2013) and Confession of a Lunatic (2015), drew on his experiences in Scandinavia. The Harbin Moths (2013), won the prestigious literary prize NOS in Russia. Hanuman’s Travels was shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize (2010) and won the Cultural Endowment of Estonia’s Prize for Russian-Language Literature (2010). First published in Tallinn in 2009, it was released in Moscow in 2010, translated into Estonian (2012), German (2012) and French (2016), and staged at Thalia Theatre (Hamburg, 2014) by Ene-Liis Semper and Tiit Ojasoo of Theatre NO99.