Quaternity. Four Novellas from the Carpathians

Maria Rybakova has been a writer since she was twenty-four. She won several prizes for her Russian novels, including “Globus”, “Eureka”, “Anthologia”, “The Students’ Booker”, “Russian Prize”, and was nominated for the international Jan Michalski literary award. Maria Rybakova’s novels have been translated into German, Spanish, and French.
“Anna Grom and Her Phantom” (1999) is an epistolary love story, while “A Sharp Knife for a Tender Heart” (2009) is a tale of a shape-shifting river spirit and its son, both causing unintended destruction in the world surrounding them. The novels “A Draught of a Human Being” (2014) and “If There is Paradise” (2020) deal with the Soviet past and the questions of guilt and responsibility. Her verse novel “Gnedich”, dedicated to the first Russian translator of the “Iliad”, appeared in an English translation in 2015. She teaches literature at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan.