Language Russian | Nominations Russian Booker Prize | |
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Notable awards Yasnaya Polyana Literary Award, 2015 Similar Yevgeny Vodolazkin, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Leonid Yuzefovich | ||
Guzel Yakhina (Russian: Гузель Яхина, born 1 June 1977, Kazan) is a Russian author and screenwriter. She is a winner of the Big Book literary prize and the Yasnaya Polyana Literary Award.
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Biography
Guzel Shamilevna Yakhina was born in Kazan. Her mother is a doctor, while her father is an engineer. She spoke Tatar at home, only learning Russian upon joining kindergarten.
She studied at the department of Foreign Languages in the Tatar State University of Humanities and Education. In 1999, she moved to Moscow. In 2015, she obtained a diploma in screen-writing from the Moscow School of Film.
Career
Yakhina worked in public relations and advertising. She began her writing career with publications in the journals Neva and Oktyabr. Sections of her debut novel Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes appeared in the journal Siberian Fires.
Yakhina's debut novel is based on the experiences of her grandmother, a Tatar woman. In the 1930s, as part of his dekulakization programme, Stalin forced a relocation of the Tatar peoples into Siberia. Yakhina's grandmother was one among them, exiled at a young age and returning home only sixteen years later. The novel describes the experiences of Zuleikha who is transported to a camp by the Angara River after the murder of her husband. Yakhina initially wrote the text as a screenplay, and later rewrote it as a novel.