Maya Kucherskaya

Maya Kucherskaya is a literary critic, novelist, biographer and teacher. A graduate of Moscow State University, she received a PhD from UCLA and is the author of more than 100 articles on literature and culture. She has served several times as a judge on Russia’s most prestigious literary award, the Booker, and her first novel (recently rewritten and published as The Rain God) received the Student Booker prize. Faith & Humor (published in Russian as Sovremenny Paterik) was shortlisted for the 2006 Bunin Prize and was published in 2011 by Russian Life Books.