Dispatches from the District Committee

Vladimir Sorokin was born in a small town outside of Moscow in 1955. He trained as an engineer at the Moscow Institute of Oil and Gas, but turned to art and writing, becoming a major presence in the Moscow underground of the 1980s. His work was banned in the Soviet Union, and his first novel, The Queue, was published by the famed émigré dissident Andrei Sinyavsky in France in 1983. In 1992, Sorokin's Collected Stories was nominated for the Russian Booker Prize; in 1999, the publication of the controversial novel Blue Lard, which included a sex scene between clones of Stalin and Khrushchev, led to public demonstrations against the book and to demands that Sorokin be prosecuted as a pornographer; in 2001, he received the Andrei Biely Award for outstanding contributions to Russian literature. Sorokin is also the author of the screenplays for the movies Moscow, The Kopeck, and 4, and of the libretto for Leonid Desyatnikov's Rosenthal's Children, the first new opera to be commissioned by the Bolshoi Theater since the 1970s. He has written numerous plays and short stories, and his work has been translated throughout the world. Among his most recent books are Sugar Kremlin and Day of the Oprichnik. He lives in Moscow.

Max Lawton is a writer, musician, and translator. He is currently working in close collaboration with Vladimir Sorokin to publish all of his untranslated works in English. His translation of Michael Lentz's Schattenfroh was one of the most anticipated English-language titles of 2025. Max is also currently working on or has plans to translate works by Antonio Moresco, Stefano D'Arrigo, Alberto Laiseca, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Eduard Limonov, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Hans Henny Jahnn, and Miquel de Palol. His first novel Progress is coming out with Verso in 2027. His translations have appeared in The New Yorker, n+1, Harper's, The Baffler, The White Review, and Joyland. He lives in Los Angeles, where, when he isn't writing, he plays heavy metal and noise music.