Lyudmila Petrushevskaya

Lyudmila Petrushevskaya is one of Russia's greatest living writers, a dramatist and fiction author born in Moscow in 1938 whose work was suppressed during the Soviet era for its unflinching depiction of ordinary Russian life, suffering, and resilience. Her plays — including Three Girls in Blue, Love and other disturbances, and numerous one-act pieces — deal with the darkness and absurdity of Soviet and post-Soviet existence with extraordinary compassion and dark humour, and have been performed at theatres worldwide. Her prose fiction, including the story collection There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour's Baby, has been translated into dozens of languages and introduced her work to international readers. Her appearance at the Pattihio Theatre in Limassol brought one of Russian literature's most important voices to Cyprus.