Forty Rooms (Grushin)

Author Bio
• Birth—1971
• Where—Moscow, Russia
• Raised—Prague, Czechoslovakia
• Education—Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts; Moscow State University; Emory University
• Awards—New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award
• Currently—lives outside Washington, DC


Olga Grushin is a Russian-born award-winning writer whose work has been translated into fifteen languages.

Born in Moscow to the family of Boris Grushin, a prominent Soviet sociologist, she spent most of her childhood in Prague, Czechoslovakia. She was educated at Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts and Moscow State University before receiving a scholarship to Emory University from which she graduated (summa cum laude) in 1993. She became a naturalized US citizen in 2002 and retains her 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, D.C., law firm, and most recently an editor at Harvard University's Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

Her first novel, The Dream Life of Sukhanov (2006), won the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Award for First Fiction and for England’s Orange Award for New Writers. The New York Times chose it as a Notable Book of the Year. Both it and her second novel, The Line (2010), were among the Washington Post’s Ten Best Books of the Year (2007, 2010). In 2007, Granta named Grushin one of the Best Young American Novelists. Forty Rooms (2016) is her third novel.

Grushin now lives outside Washington, D.C., with her two children. (Adapted from the publisher and Wikipedia. Retrieved 3/5/2016.)