In 1972, he made his literary debut with a publication in the newspaper Za kadry neftyanikov (Russian: За кадры нефтяников, For the workers in the petroleum industry).

Soon after, his stories appeared in Russian literary miscellanies and magazines Tretya Modernizatsiya (The Third Modernization), Mitin Zhurnal (Mitya's Journal), Konets Veka (End of the Century), and Vestnik Novoy Literatury (Bulletin of the New Literature).

[12] In 2016 he was accused by pro-Kremlin activists of "extremism", "pro-cannibalism themes" and "going against Russian Orthodox values" because of his satirical short story "Nastya" (2000), which describes how a 16-year-old is cooked alive in an oven and eaten by her family and friends.

[13][14] Sorokin's books have been translated into English, Portuguese, Spanish, French, German, Dutch, Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Italian, Polish, Japanese, Serbian, Korean, Romanian, Estonian, Lithuanian, Slovak, Czech, Hungarian, Croatian and Slovenian, and are available through a number of prominent publishing houses, including Gallimard, Fischer, DuMont, BV Berlin, Haffman, Mlinarec & Plavic and Verlag der Autoren.

In December 2019, Russian filmmaker Ilya Belov released the documentary "Sorokin Trip" [15] in which he portrayed and examined the writer's life and work.

[17] In March 2022, Sorokin was among the signatories of an appeal by eminent writers to all Russian speakers to spread the truth inside Russia about the war against Ukraine.