Vadim Yarmolinets
Born: 1958
Quick Study: Vadim Yarmolinets, who has lived in the United States for over 20 years, is a fiction writer, journalist, and radio host who also founded a literary award.
The Yarmolinets File: Vadim Yarmolinets is a journalist and fiction writer who made the Big Book Award short list in 2009 with the novel Lead Zeppelin: Jericho 86-89, a book that includes Yarmolinets’s native city, Odessa, and a journalist character who’s forced to move to the United States. Yarmolinets’s literary resume also includes books of “ironic prose,” essays, and stories. He has worked as a journalist in Odessa and New York, and hosts a morning show on Davidzon Radio, an AM station.
Psssst………: Yarmolinets founded and coordinates the O. Henry “Gift of the Magi” literary competition for Russian-language short stories with themes from “The Gift of the Magi.”
Yarmolinets’s Places: Born in Odessa, where he studied in the foreign language department of Odessa University. Emigrated to the U.S. in 1989. Lives in New York.
The Word on Yarmolinets: A review of Lead Zeppelin: Jericho 86-89 on OpenSpace.ru says the book, is “a curious document, maybe historical, maybe personal, depending on your perspective, but most likely historical.”
Yarmolinets on Yarmolinets and Writing: Yarmolinets said in an interview that after reading two books about the 1990s—Mikhail Butov’s Freedom and Leonid Yuzefovich’s Cranes and Dwarves—he realized that “after 20 years outside the country where I was born, I’ve become a foreigner. I won’t even consider answering the question of who I am: a Russian writer living in America or an American who writes in Russian.”
Yarmolinets Recommends: In an interview about his Lead Zeppelin, Yarmolinets mentioned Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Ivan Bunin as the peak of Russian literature, adding that, as a writer, he uses Tom Wolfe’s new journalism as a technical guide because it’s “more organic to my time, the place I live, and my personal experience.”