Writers

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.”


More on Yarmolinets

Awards & Nominations:

  • Lead Zeppelin: Jericho 86–89 (Свинцовый дирижабль. Иерихон 86-89) – finalist, Big Book, 2009

Selected Other Titles:

  • Notes of a Moonshine Maker (Записки самогонщика), 2016
  • Besides the Scenery: American Short Stories (Кроме пейзажа: Американские рассказы), 2012
  • Here in New York (У нас в Нью-Йорке), essays, 2003
  • Send-Offs (Проводы), stories, 2002

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