Anne O. Fisher

Julia Lukshina, fiction writer and dramaturg

Julia Lukshina is an ex-art historian turned fiction writer, screenwriter, and playwright. Lukshina's fiction has appeared in Russian in Znamya, Sovremennaya dramaturgiya, Novyi bereg, Novyi mir, and elsewhere. Two of her plays have been finalists at the Lyubimovka Young Playwrights Festival in Moscow («Нервы» [“Nervous”] in 2016 and «Жалейки» [“Big Hugs”] in 2019). In 2018, the Russian TV series “The Optimists,” for which she is a writer, won the Golden Eagle Prize for Best TV Series from Russia’s National Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She wrote the screenplay for the film Chelovek iz Podolska (The Man from Podolsk), featured at the 2020 Kinotavr film festival. Oh, and she’s also fluent in English and German. I love Julia’s writing because of her restraint and deployment of detail. Nobody says they are angry in Julia’s stories: it’s in the way they sigh, or stir their coffee. And her dialogue is rich, expressive, and compact—a beautiful challenge for the translator.