Career
His first novel, Captain of the Steppe, has been translated into English and published by And Other Stories in 2013. Born in Moscow in 1970, Pavlov spent his military service as a prison guard in Kazakhstan. Many of the incidents portrayed in his fiction were inspired by his experiences there.
During his service, Pavlov suffered a head injury, was hospitalised, and spent over a month in a psychiatric ward.
This allowed him to be released from the army before the end of the mandatory two-year military service. He went on to study at the Institute of Literature in Moscow.