Penguin Speakers Bureau

Anya Ulinich was born in Moscow in 1973 during the tightly regulated social stagnation that characterized the Soviet Union’s final decades. She has described her early education as “ten years of boredom layered with trauma.” Though they had almost no money, and just some twenty words of English among the four of them, her family immigrated to Phoenix, Arizona, when Ulinich was seventeen. To a teenager from Moscow, the desert southwest seemed like another planet, yet Ulinich slowly found her way into the dizzying variety of pop culture, learning English by watching television shows like The A-Team and Hunter and by studying for a state cosmetology exam. She later attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of California, Davis, where she earned her MFA in painting.

Ulinich returned to Russia briefly in her early twenties and came back to the states with a shoebox of her father’s black-and-white negatives. She shut herself in a darkroom to develop them and for months she “peered into [her] own black-and-white baby eyes, and stewed in nostalgia.” When she finally emerged from the darkroom, Ulinich began making narrative paintings full of photographs and text. The photos became her link between painting and writing; the memories they evoked inspired her visual art, but her experience in the darkroom also flipped an internal narrative switch.

In 2000, Ulinich moved from the southwest to Brooklyn. With no room to paint in her small apartment and no money for a studio, she turned to writing and soon discovered that what had been oblique in her paintings found full life in her characters and stories. This was the beginning of acclaimed debut novel Petropolis, which has since earned comparison with Nabokov’s work, both for pitch-perfect American English and its protagonist’s unblinking yet affectionate shrewdness about her adopted country. In 2007, Petropolis was honored with the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” Award.

Learn more about this speaker

"The Nurse and the Novelist"
Pen America Journal

“Is Anya Ulinich’s New Short Story an Attack on Jonathan Safron Foer?"
New York Magazine

"Anya Ulinich: An Interview"
ABC Radio's The Book Show

"The Amazing Anya Ulinich"
NPR News' The Bryant Park Project

"Kevin Kinsella interviews Anya Ulinich"
The Maud Newton Blog

"Dreaming of a Life of Privilege, but First..."
The New York Times

“From Paint to Pen: Petropolis Novel explores life’s absurdities from Russia to Brooklyn with a detour for love"
San Francisco Chronicle

“Russian as an American Language: a Conversation with Anya Ulinich”
Zeek

• Anya Ulinich at the 2008 National Book Awards