Vladimir Sorokin and Jamey Gambrell at Columbia U this Wednesday

[Ronald Meyer]

Vladimir Sorokin and Jamey Gambrell: A Dialogue Between Author and
Translator
Wednesday, 25 April 2007, 6:00pm–9:00pm
Altschul Auditorium
417 International Affairs Building
A light reception will follow the discussion


Vladimir Sorokin

Vladimir Sorokin was born on August 7, 1955 in the small town of
Bykovo, near Moscow. He made his literary debut in 1972 in the
large industrial newspaper Za kadry neftyanikov. In 1977, he
graduated from the Moscow Instutute of Oil and Gas with a degree in
engineering, but quickly abandoned this field to pursue his
interests in in graphic arts, painting, and conceptual art.
Throughout the 1970s, Sorokin participated in a number of art
exhibitions and designed and illustrated nearly 50 books.

Sorokin’s development as a writer took place amidst painters and
writers of the Moscow underground scene of the 1980s. In 1985, six
of Sorokin’s stories appeared in the Paris magazine A-Ya. In the
same year, French publisher Syntaxe published his novel Ochered'
(The Queue).

Sorokin's works, bright and striking examples of underground
culture, were banned during the Soviet period. His first
publication in the USSR appeared in November 1989, when the
Riga-based Latvian magazine Rodnik (Spring) presented a group of
Sorokin's stories. Soon after, his stories appeared in Russian
literary miscellanies and magazines Tretya Modernizatsiya (The
Third Modernization), Mitin, Konets Veka (End of the Century), and
Vestnik Novoy Literatury (Bulletin of the New Literature). In 1992,
Russian publishing house Russlit published Sbornik Rasskazov
(Collected Stories) – Sorokin’s first book to be nominated for a
Russian Booker Award. In September 2001, Vladimir Sorokin received
the National Booker Award; two months later, he was presented with
the Award of Andrey Beliy for outstanding contributions to Russian
literature.

Sorokin's books have been translated into English, French, German,
Dutch, Finnish, Swedish, Italian, Polish, Japanese, and Korean and
are available through a number of prominent publishing houses,
including Gallimard, Fischer, DuMont, BV Berlin, Haffman, and
Verlag der Autoren.

He is also a member of Russian Pen club.

Jamey Gambrell

Jamey Gambrell is a writer on Russian art and culture. Her
translations include Marina Tsvetaeva's Earthly Signs: Moscow
Diaries, 1917–1922, a volume of Aleksandr Rodchenko's writings,
Experiments for the Future, and many of the stories included in
Tatyana Tolstaya's White Walls. Her translation of Vladimir
Sorokin's Ice has recently been published by NYRB Classics.

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