Oleg Yermakov

He was born in Smolensk in 1961, and worked in a forest reserve near Lake Baikal before doing his military service during the war in Afghanistan.

He followed up with a novel, The Mark of the Beast (1994) which was nominated for the Russian Booker Prize.

Ermakov's work is heavily engaged with the question of place as evidenced by books such as Rainbow and Heather, a 2018 Big Book Award finalist, set in Smolensk, and The Tungus’s Song, a 2017 Yasnaya Polyana Award finalist, set in Siberia.

Other places important in his work are the Altai, Baikal, and Barguzin areas as well as Afghanistan.

The 2012 collection of stories, The Arithmetic of War, returns to this theme in his work.