ELKOST Intl. literary agency handles world translation rights in ALL WORKS by Andrei Ivanov

Winner of the 2018 Tallinn University Literary Award
Winner of the 2019 Estonian Cultural Endowment’s Russian Author Award
Winner of the 2018 Tallinn University Literary Award
Winner of the 2016 Annual Estonian National Culture Award
Winner of the 2016 Estonian Cultural Endowment’s Russian Author Award
Winner of the 2013 NOS Literature Award
Winner of the 2013 Estonian Cultural Endowment’s Russian Author Award
The 2013 Russian Booker Prize nominee
Winner of the 2011 Estonian Cultural Endowment’s Russian Author Award
Winner of the 2011 Tallinn University Literary Award
Finalist of the 2010 Russian Booker Prize
Winner of the 2009 and 2010 Russian Literary Prize
Winner of the 2009 Estonian Cultural Endowment’s Russian Author Award
Winner of the 2009 Yuri Dolgoruky Foundation Prize

Andrei Ivanov (b. 24/12/1971) sees himself as part of the Russian literary tradition, but identifies with Estonia as his home country and his creative point of departure. He graduated from Tallinn pedagogical university as a Russian philologist, lived in Denmark in a hippy commune, travelled elsewhere in Scandinavia, and he writes in Russian. His novels A Handful of Dust (2011) and Hanuman’s Travels (2009) recount his experiences in Scandinavia.

Ivanov’s most well-known book to date Hanuman’s Travels has been translated into Estonian (2012), German (2012), French (2016) and English (2018). It is a picaresque novel, about a Russian from Tallinn who is a wanted man and his companion in fortune who is named after a monkey god, and their adventures in Denmark and its refugee camps, in constant fear of capture.

His novel Harbin Moths, which was published in 2013 and has already won several important literary awards, also deals with refugee life. It has been named one of the most noteworthy and acutely observed books to appear in Estonia in 2013, as well as the one with the most emotionally grating subject matter.

Andrei Ivanov has also published novellas and stories. He has been a member of the Estonian Writer’s Union since 2013. 

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Homo viator, the travelling man, is a defining figures of our times, and Tallinn-based writer Andrei Ivanov is his dedicated chronicler. Over the last ten years Ivanov has achieved the impressive feat of publishing more than ten books, almost all of which seek to understand the lives of wanderers, exiles, émigrés, the stateless, and other outsiders.

The protagonist of Ivanov’s short story ‘Cinders’ sums up the key motif of Ivanov’s literary universe: ‘It turns out that life consists of nothing more than moving from one room to another, from one car to another, from one train to another, and from one country to another….it’s the normal state of affairs: on déménage.’ Ivanov first took up this theme in his Scandinavian saga, which describes the first-person protagonist’s adventures in the refugee camps of Denmark, and his life as a non-citizen (a member of the Russian minority) in Estonia. It includes the novels ‘Bathyscaphe’, ‘Hanuman’s Journey to Lolland’ (translated into English as ‘Hanuman’s Travels’), ‘Bizarre’, ‘Confessions of a Lunatic’ and ‘A Handful of Dust’, as well as the collection ‘Copenhagen’, the prose poem, ‘A Night in Saint-Cloud’s’, and other short stories such as ‘My Danish Uncle’.

In 2013, Ivanov embarked on a new cycle of novels focussing on the history of Russian émigrés, the first part of which was ‘Harbin Moths’. Ivanov’s most recent work, ‘The Inhabitants of the Curious Cemetery’, can be seen as the next instalment in this series, and it the author’s magnum opus (as well as being his longest work so far). All of Ivanov’s main themes and literary influences come together in this novel, allowing his literary talents to achieve heights which few other writers can aspire to.