Viktor Astafyev was born in the village of Ovsyanka (then Krasnoyarsk Uyezd, Yeniseysk Governorate, Russian SFSR) on the bank of the Yenisey river.

[1] His father, Pyotr Pavlovich Astafyev, was a son of a relatively rich mill-owner (a part-time hunter who most of his time though spent at home), mother Lydia Ilyinichna Astafyeva (née Potylitsyna) came from a peasant family.

First Pyotr, Pavel and the latter's father (Astafyev grand-grandfather) Yakov Maximovich were arrested as part of the Dekulakization campaign and sent to a Siberian labour camp.

In July 1931 Lydia Ilyinichna, Viktor's mother drowned in the Yenisey as the boat which she was rowing, carrying food to the Krasnoyarsk prison where her arrested husband was kept, got upturned.

Seven-year-old Viktor found himself in the house of Yekaterina Petrovna and Ilya Yevgrafovich Potylitsyns, his mother’s parents who gave the boy all their love and care.

It was there that for the first time I've heard the radio, the gramophone, the brass orchestra... And it was in Igarka that I wrote my first ever short story which my teacher Rozhdestvensky published in our school's self-edited journal.

[3] In October 1942 Astafyev volunteered for the Soviet Army and, after six months spent in reserve units (first in Berdsk, then in Novosibirsk) in April 1943 was moved to the Kaluga region as a soldier of the 92nd Howitzer brigade of the Kiev-Zhitomir division.

"Since then I was unfit for an active service and was drifting from one reserve unit to another until I settled at the postal point of the 1st Ukrainian Front nearby Zhmerinka station.

Here I met a fellow soldier, Maria Semyonovna Koryakina, married her after demobilization and went with her to her place in the town of Chusovoy of the Perm (then Molotov) oblast," he wrote in autobiography.

In 1955 he left the newspaper and started working upon his first novel Snows are Melting (Tayut Snega) which was published in 1958, as was his first book of short stories Warm Rain (Tyoply Dozhd), dedicated mostly to the experience of Russian soldiers and civilians during recent war.

[3] In 1959, Astafyev enrolled in the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow; he became friends with Sergey Vikulov, Yevgeny Nosov and a group of Vologda authors.

By 1984 four films based on his work had been produced, including Falling Stars by Igor Talankin and Arkady Sirenko's Born Twice, the latter featuring Astafyev as a scriptwriter.

In 1988–1989 Astafyev visited France (where his Sad Detective was published), Bulgaria (to oversee his 1966 short novel The Theft being screened) and Greece and took part in the 1989 Congress of People's Deputies of the Soviet Union.

The epic novel The Cursed and the Slain (Proklyaty i Ubity, books 1 and 2, 1992–1993) brought Astafyev The State Prize of the Russian Federation in May 1996.

[11] In 1999, his novel Jolly Soldier, which portrayed the horrors of the Soviet Army was met with extremely adverse reaction, which may have brought about a heart failure.

[13] He is credited with being one of the major proponents (alongside Viktor Nekrasov, Vasil Bykaŭ, Vladimir Bogomolov, Konstantin Vorobyov) of the so-called The Truth from the Trenches (okopnaya pravda) movement (the term was used originally in a derogatory sense by detractors who argued that former soldiers could not be trusted to write about the Great war objectively, being ignorant of its greater 'truths') which brought authenticity and harsh realism to the Soviet war literature.

His novel Prokliaty i ubity [The Damned and the Dead] is a gritty, typically uncompromising picture of war, with many naturalistic descriptions in a style the author has developed since the cathartic Pechal'nyi detektiv.

Capable of surprising and even shocking his reader, Astafyev maintains a deep lyrical sense that has produced what Eidel'man called "the best descriptions of nature for decades".