Rubén Gallego

After being born with severe cerebral palsy in the Soviet Union, Gallego was separated from his family at the age of one.

Born without the use of his hands and feet, Gallego was tenacious and survived to adulthood, eventually marrying and having children.

His memoir, White on Black [ru], about his dreadful childhood in different Soviet orphanages won the Russian Booker Prize.

The book was translated into English and published, in January 2006, as White on Black: A Boy's Story.

The book has also been translated into French (2002 by Aurora Gallego Rodríguez and Joëlle Roche-Parfenov, Actes Sud/Solin), Vietnamese, Swedish (2005 by Ola Wallin, Ersatz), Lithuanian (2005 by Andrius Šiuša), Polish (2005 by Katarzyna Maria Janowska, Wydawnictwo Znak), Finnish (2006 by Teemu Kaskinen, Sammakko), Icelandic (2007 by Helga Brekkan, JPV), Hebrew (2008 by S. Levin), Czech (2009 by Denisa Šťastná, Revolver Revue), Georgian (2009 by Nino Bekishvili), Esperanto (2010 by Kalle Kniivilä), Romanian (2019) by Liliana Radulescu and Nicoleta Silivestru, and Estonian (2020) by Valdek Kiiver.