Join us for a special event of the Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series, presented by Inprint, The Menil Collection, Deep Vellum Publishing, Rice University Department of English, and The Consulate General of Ukraine in Houston featuring renowned Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov and his acclaimed novel, Grey Bees. After his reading, Andrey will be in conversation with Rice professor and noted Italian novelist Andrea Bajani. A book sale and signing will follow.
Translated by Boris Dralyuk, Grey Bees received the 2022 Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize from the National Book Critics Circle. With his signature humor, Ukraine’s most famous novelist presents a balanced and illuminating portrait of modern conflict along the Russian border.
Born near Leningrad in 1961, Andrey Kurkov was a journalist, prison warder, camera operator, and screenplay-writer before he became well known as a novelist. He received “hundreds of rejections” and was a pioneer of self-publishing, selling more than 75,000 copies of his books in a single year. His novel Death and the Penguin, his first in English translation, became an international bestseller, translated into more than 30 languages. As well as writing fiction for adults and children, he has become known as a commentator and journalist on Ukraine for the international media. His 2023 Diary of an Invasion is a collection of Kurkov’s wartime writings and broadcasts from Kyiv, and his upcoming novel Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv, longlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize, will be published in the U.S. in April 2024. He lives in Kyiv with his British wife and their three children.
Andrea Bajani is one of the most acclaimed and award-winning novelists of contemporary Italian and European literature. He is the author of nine books, including If You Kept a Record of Sins, Every Promise, and The Book of Homes. He is the editor of The Stories We Tell, a collection of essays about writing, which includes texts by Margaret Atwood, Jhumpa Lahiri, Zadie Smith, and Michael Ondaatje. Bajani teaches at Rice University in the Department of English and the Department of Modern and Classical Literatures and Cultures.
As always, Menil programs are free and open to all.
