Victor Pelevin

Victor Olegovich Pelevin (Виктор Олегович Пелевин; born 22 November 1962) is a Russian fiction writer.

Victor Olegovich Pelevin was born in Moscow on 22 November 1962 to Zinaida Semenovna Efremova, an English teacher, and Oleg Anatolyevich Pelevin, a teacher at the military department of Bauman University.

He lived on Tverskoy Boulevard in Moscow, later moving to Chertanovo.

In 1979, Pelevin graduated from an elite high school with a special English program located on Stanislavskogo Street in the centre of Moscow, now Kaptsov Gymnasium #1520.

He then attended the Moscow Power Engineering Institute (MPEI) graduating with a degree in electromechanical engineering in 1985.

In April of that year, MPEI Department of Electrical Transport hired him as engineer.

Pelevin served in the Russian Air Force.

From 1987 to 1989, Pelevin attended the MPEI graduate school.

Pelevin travels to Asia often and has been to Nepal, South Korea, China and Japan.

While he does not call himself a Buddhist, he is engaged in Buddhist practices.

Pelevin has repeatedly said that despite the fact that his characters use drugs, he is not an addict even though he experimented with mind-expanding substances in his youth.

Pelevin is not married.

Pelevin has no current or past public social media accounts (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, VKontakte)

In 1989, Pelevin attended Mikhail Lobanov's creative writing seminar at Maxim Gorky Literary Institute.

While studying at the Institute, Pelevin met the young novelist Albert Egazarov and the poet Victor Kulle, later a literary critic.

From 1989 to 1990, Pelevin worked as a staff reporter for the magazine Face to Face.

In 1989, he also began to work in the journal Nauka i Religiya (Science and Religion), where he edited a series of articles on eastern mysticism.

In 1989, Nauka i Religiya published Pelevin's first short story "The Sorcerer Ignat and People".

Pelevin was expelled from the Institute in 1991.

Egazarov and Kulle went on to found a publishing house, first called The Day, then The Raven and Myth, for which Pelevin has edited three volumes of Carlos Castaneda's work.

In 1991, Pelevin published his first collection of stories The Blue Lantern.

Two years later, it received the Russian Little Booker Prize.

His novels include Omon Ra (1992), The Life of Insects (1993), Chapayev and Void (1996), and Generation P (1999).

In March 1992, Pelevin published his first novel Omon Ra in the literary journal Znamya.

The novel attracted the attention of literary critics and was nominated for the Booker Prize.

He is a laureate of multiple literary awards including the Russian Little Booker Prize (1993) and the Russian National Bestseller (2004), the former for the short story collection The Blue Lantern (1991).

His books are multi-layered postmodernist texts fusing elements of pop culture and esoteric philosophies while carrying conventions of the science fiction genre.

Some critics relate his prose to the New Sincerity literary movement.

In April 1993, the same journal published Pelevin's next novel The Life of Insects.

In 1993, Pelevin published an essay "John Fowles and the tragedy of Russian liberalism" in Nezavisimaya Gazeta.

The essay was the writer's answer to some negative critics' reactions to his work.

In the same year, Pelevin was admitted to the Russian Union of Journalists.

In 1994, it received InterPressCon and the Bronze Snail awards.

In 1996, Pelevin participated in the International Writing Program residency at the University of Iowa.

That same year, Znamya published Pelevin's novel Chapayev and Void.

Critics called it "the first Zen Buddhist novel in Russian".

The writer himself called it "the first novel which takes place in an absolute vacuum".

In 1997, the novel won Strannik (Russian Literary Award) for science fiction, and in 2001 it was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award.

In 1999, Pelevin's novel Generation P was published.

In December 2018, the media reported that the writer Victor Pelevin registered in the register of individual entrepreneurs in the territorial office of the Pension Fund in Moscow.