Tony Vilgotsky

Biography

Tony was born on July 14, 1980 in Southern Russian city Rostov-on-Don. He spent some time studying journalism in local university and then started to work as a correspondent in local daily newspaper.

From the teen age he was admired of horrors and that was the reason why he began to write horrors by himself. Two issues of his dark fantasy saga The Chronicles of Skharn (Russian: Хроники Схарны) were published by Armada publishing house on December 2008 and May 2009. First of these novels landed on 7th position in Top 100 bestselling books of this publishing house of several years. Such phenomenal success of debut novel was unexpected even for author himself. This book was nominated for prestigious Russian fiction award Roscon. The novel Evil Never Sleeps was nominated for one of the main awards of the fiction festival Star Bridge. Vilgotsky's next novel Little Shop of Horrors became one of the most anticipated Russian books of the following decade. His books were widely pirated and in 2010 somebody even hacked Vilgotsky's PC with intention to steal his new texts before their official release.

The novels Eye of Satan, Suburban Necromancer and The Charmed Roads were released in 2012 by company Litres which is a department of biggest Russian publishing house Eksmo.

During very long period Vilgotsky was the main author of Russian metal magazine Dark City and one of the most known Russian music journalists. During this period he interviewed such bands like Amon Amarth, Das Ich, Crematory, Sopor Aeternus and the Ensemble of Shadows, Suicide Commando and many more. For some time he was a literary editor of Russian horror webzine The Darkness (Тьма) and continued to write for its successor, Darker magazine. Tony Vilgotsky was one of the men who stood at the source of the first Russian horror fiction anthology. Also, though Vilgotsky himself is not gay, his articles about different gay musicians often can be noticed in Russian LGBT-magazine Kvir. Also he works as translator and music observer in Russian version of Classic Rock magazine.

He was the first Russian journalist who interviewed American musician and actor Ari Lehman (the first portrayer of Jason Voorhees in the first "Friday the 13th" movie), and famous movie composer Harry Manfredini who scored most of the "Friday" movies. The latter interview was published in Mir Fantastiki Later Vilgotsky interviewed many horror celebrities, including Tom Savini, Felissa Rose, Scott Derrickson, Brian Paulin, Matt Farnsworth, Dieter Laser, Victor Brooke Miller and more.

From 2012 Vilgotsky began to collaborate with Hollywood horror magazine Gore Noir. Also he writes for Australian horror magazine Midnight Echo.

Vilgotsky is also the first author in Russia who created a full biography of Ayn Rand.

Illustrations

In 2017 Tony released a new non-fiction book Self-defence by materials at hand with illustrations drawn by himself. This book is intended mostly for female audience.

Video game career

On December 2016 Vilgotsky announced that he wants to try himself as game designer and that he started to develop his first video game. Details of this project weren't revealed yet. Due to Vilgotsky's popularity over Post-Soviet space, the news about his first game project were widely spread by many sources of the region. Later was announced that Vilgotsky is planning to release another game before the one that was announced earlier. The name of the game is Evils Spirits Shotdown and it's based on his own novel Warriors of the Church.

Personal life

As Tony admitted in one of his interviews, he is an enthusiastic gamer who began to play videogames from the early childhood. Among his favorite games he lists such titles as Witcher, Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2, Hellgate: London and Assassin's Creed. He's a fan of ambient and world music (because, as he admits, he was tired of extreme metal during his metal observer career).

He's also a big fan of Twin Peaks TV series and other movies by David Lynch.

Filmography