Bio

Alissa Ganíeva is a fiction and essay writer from Dagestan in the south of Russia, now based in Moscow. A graduate of the Maxim Gorky Institute of Literature and Creative Writing, she published Salaam Dalgat!, her controversial first long story, under a male pseudonym, winning the 2009 national Debut Prize. Her next novel The Mountain And The Wall published in Russia in 2012 is being translated into different languages and received lots of media appraisal. Her last novel Bride And Bridegroom (2015) has been shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize and took a special prize. Ganíeva is a member of the Russian PEN-center and active in expressing her views on social and political changes in Russia. In Moscow she works as an editor for the books reviewing supplement to the Nezavisimaya Gazeta newspaper.

Project

I’m intending to finish my fiction collection of long and short stories dedicated to different aspects, absurdities, controversies and perspectives of today’s life in Russia. And not only in my native troubled, vivid and multinational region of North Caucasus, but in the country in general. These would be realistic, but somewhat mystical stories where all kinds of characters and worldviews clash in the most unexpected situations and places like trains, buses, hotels, weddings and funerals. One of the stories would be related to a hundred years anniversary of Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. This would include correction and editing stories on the final stage of the work.