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Trained as a medical doctor, Vassily Aksyonov made his Soviet literary debut in 1960 with Colleagues, an instant classic. Although perhaps the most popular Soviet writer of prose in the 1960s and 1970s, he was forced into exile in 1980. He emigrated to the United States and settled in the Washington DC area, where he continued to write and gain popularity among American readers. The Winter’s Hero was published in 1996 by Random House, the final volume in English of the trilogy that began in 1994 with Generations of Winter. In 1999, he wrote The New Sweet Style (Random House). Other works include The Island of Crimea (Random House, 1983), The Burn (Random House/Houghton Mifflin, 1984), In Search of Melancholy Baby (Vintage, 1989), and Say Cheese (Random House, 1989). His latest book, Voltaire and the Voltairennes, won the coveted Open Russia Booker Prize in 2004. Today he divides his time between Biarritz and Moscow.
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