Plough Quarterly No. 19 - School for Life

Eugene Vodolazkin’s second novel, Laurus, won both of Russia’s major literary awards, the National Big Book Award and the Yasnaya Polyana Book Award, and was shortlisted for the National Bestseller Prize and the Russian Booker Prize. His debut novel, Solovyov and Larionov, was shortlisted for the Andrei Bely Prize and the Big Book Award. Two other critically acclaimed novels, The Aviator and Brisbane, have also been translated into English. Vodolazkin was the 2019 winner of the Solzhenitsyn Prize. He was born in Kiev in 1964 and has worked in the department of Old Russian Literature at Pushkin House since 1990. He is an expert in medieval history and folklore and has numerous academic books and articles to his name. The author lives with his family in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Karen Swallow Prior (PhD, SUNY Buffalo) is the 2025-26 Karlson Scholar at Bethel Seminary. She is the author of You Have a Calling; The Evangelical Imagination; On Reading Well; Fierce Convictions; and Booked. She is coeditor of Cultural Engagement: A Crash Course in Contemporary Issues and has contributed to numerous other books. Prior is a frequent speaker, a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum, a contributing writer at The Dispatch, a research fellow for Comment, and a monthly columnist at Religion News Service.

Christian Wiman is the Clement-Muehl Professor of the Arts at Yale Divinity School. He is the author, editor, or translator of fifteen books, including Zero at the Bone and Hammer Is the Prayer. His work appears regularly in Harper’s, The New Yorker, and Commonweal.

Julian Peters is an illustrator and comic book artist living in Montreal, Canada, who focuses on adapting classical poems into graphic art. His work has been exhibited internationally and published in several poetry and graphic art collections. Peters holds a master’s degree in Art History, and in 2015, served as “Cartoonist in Residence” at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand.

Sakina Denise Uwimana-Reinhardt was born to Rwandan immigrant parents in Burundi. She later moved to Rwanda, where she met her husband, Charles. When she was twenty-nine, she survived the Rwandan genocide of 1994 with her three sons; her husband was killed. After finding personal healing and reconciliation, she went on to found Iriba Shalom International, an organization that provides material and spiritual help to genocide survivors. She remarried and now lives with her husband, Dr. Wolfgang Reinhardt, in Kassel, Germany. Together they continue to work for healing in Rwanda.