Evgeny Sukhov

Potsdam, Kazan, the first line

I was born in 1959 in Potsdam. I wrote my first novella at about eight, and nobody printed it, which was probably fair. At fifteen I was printed for the first time, in the newspaper Komsomolets Tatarstana. I had no idea yet what would come of it.

I date my writing life from 1982, when Vecherniaya Kazan published my diary from a geology field practice on Sakhalin. I have not stopped writing since.

Two lives

I worked for about thirty years at Kazan University, in the Department of Historical Geology and Palaeontology. From 1985 to 1991 I organised and scientifically led expeditions to the Pechora province, in the north-east of European Russia. I defended my candidate's thesis (the Russian equivalent of a PhD) in 1991 and my doctorate in 2007, both on Permian foraminifera: microscopic organisms by which geologists date rock. In the doctorate I described 84 new species and two new genera. One of them, Ichthyolaria parfenopa, is still listed in the international scientific database under my name.

In the morning there was the microscope; in the evening, the manuscript. Many readers of my novels did not know I was a scientist, and my colleagues at the department did not always know I wrote novels. It never bothered me: in science and in fiction alike you need patience and the ability to read traces.

The books

In 1993 the Kazan newspaper Molodyozh Tatarstana began serialising my novel I Am a Thief-in-Law. In 1996 the books got their own series, and it is still coming out. Since 2000 I have worked with the publisher Eksmo.

I now have more than a hundred books: mafia sagas, SMERSH: Stalin's Special Forces and the postwar manhunt, historical novels, Notes of a Court Detective. I try to see every series through to the end and to keep it readable in order. By my own count, the combined print run of my books exceeds fifteen million copies.

Today

In 2016 the television series Stalin's Diamonds was made from my novels. Since 2021 I have been writing the trilogy The Wanderings of the Wonder-Worker: in 2024 it reached the final of the Fazil Iskander International Prize, and in 2025 it won the Derzhavin Prize. In the same year, 2025, The Genius of the Capital's Detective Bureau, The Kazan Cain and The Villain in Love were named on the long list of the Russian Detective Prize.

I live between Kazan and Vienna and write wherever my desk happens to stand. Everything else about myself, I tell in my books.