Olga Grushin

Education

She was educated at Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts and Moscow State University before receiving a scholarship to Emory University in 1989. She graduated summa cum laude from Emory in 1993.

Career

Born in Moscow to the family of Boris Grushin, a prominent Soviet sociologist, Olga Grushin spent most of her childhood in Prague, Czechoslovakia. She became a naturalized United States citizen in 2002, but retains Russian citizenship. Grushin has worked as an interpreter for Jimmy Carter, as a cocktail waitress in a jazz bar, a translator at the World Bank, a research analyst at a Washington, District of Columbia law firm, and, most recently, an editor at Harvard University"s Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

The novel is about an artist–turned–party official working for the communist media as an art critic named Sukhanov whose "past catches up with him during the last days of the Soviet Union", and reviewing it in the Chicago Tribune, poet Karl Kirchwey wrote:.

Achievements

• Her first novel, The Dream Life of Sukhanov written in English, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2006, won the 2007 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, as well as a Top Ten Books of 2006 choice by the Washington Post.