Sana Valiulina

Jan Hanlo Essayprijs  (2017, Netherlands)
Libris Literature Prize nominee (2006, Netherlands)

Sana Valiulina (b. 1964) grew up in Tallinn, Estonia. After studying Norwegian Language and Literature in Moscow, she emigrated to the Netherlands. She made her debut in 2000 with the semi-autobiographical and much discussed novel originally written in Dutch, The Cross, about life in a Moscow student flat. This was followed in 2002 by the novella collection From Nowhere With Love.

Her breakthrough came in 2006 with the epic Didar and Faruk, which is based upon her parents’s life during Stalin’s reign of terror. The novel was nominated for the Libris Literature Prize. In 2010 she published A Hundred Years of Conviviality, followed in 2014 by Brezhnev’s Children written in Russian and Dutch.