Come and discuss Russia past and present in contemporary Russian fiction with Guzel Yakhina, the Tatar-Russian prize-winning author of Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes, about Tatars deported to Siberia, and Alexander Snegirev, whose new novel Vera won the latest Russian Booker Prize.  Talk and Q&A, followed by drinks.  In Russian, interpreted into English.

Guzel Yakhina was born in Kazan in 1977 and has lived in Moscow since 1999.  Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes, which won this year's Big Book Prize, is Yakhina's first novel.

Alexander Snegirev was born in Moscow in 1980.  In 2009 he received the Debut Award for Young Authors. His novel Petroleum Venus (2008), about an architect raising a son with Down's syndrome, was nominated for a series of leading literary prizes, and his works have been translated into English, German and Swedish.

Anastasia Koro is a PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature at Queen Mary, University of London.  Her research focuses on Russian Formalist and Constructivist aesthetic theory and she also teaches European literature.  She is a founder and organizer of a Russian Literary Salon which convenes regularly to discuss Russian Modernist literature.

Doors open 6pm; talk and Q&A 6.30pm; drinks 7.30pm.  Tickets £7, £5 including drinks.

 Это мероприятие организовано в  рамках проекта Read Russia www.readrussia.org