Dmitry Glukhovsky

Origins and early life

Dmitry Glukhovsky was born in Moscow on 12 June 1979, the son of Alexei Glukhovsky, a Jewish journalist and translator who worked for Soviet state broadcasting, and of Larisa Smirnova, a Russian photo editor at the TASS agency; he has spoken of his father's Jewish origin himself, in the Jewish press, and he holds Israeli citizenship.

Work and career

He studied journalism and international relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, then worked as a reporter for EuroNews in Lyon, for Deutsche Welle and for Russian television. In 2002 he posted online, chapter by chapter and for free, a novel he had begun as a teenager: Metro 2033, the story of the survivors of a nuclear war living in the tunnels of the Moscow metro. Printed in 2005, it became a phenomenon — millions of copies, translations into dozens of languages, the video games Metro 2033, Metro: Last Light and Metro Exodus developed in Ukraine by 4A Games, and a shared universe of novels by other writers — followed by Metro 2034 and Metro 2035, the dystopia Futu.re, the novel Text and its film adaptation, and the series Outpost.

He condemned Russia's invasion of Ukraine from its first days; the Russian state declared him a 'foreign agent' in 2022 and in August 2023 a Moscow court sentenced him in absentia to eight years in prison for 'spreading false information' about the army. He lives in exile in Europe.