Gift

One of the twentieth century's master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov (1899 - 1977) was born in St Petersburg, but left Russia when the Bolsheviks seized power. He studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, where he launched a brilliant literary career. In 1940 he moved to the United States, and achieved renown as a novelist, poet, critic, and translator. He taught literature at Wellesley, Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard. In 1961 he moved to Montreux, Switzerland, where he died in 1977. His first novel in English was The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, published in 1941. His other books include Ada or Ardor (1969), Laughter in the Dark (1933), Pale Fire (1962), the short story collection Details of a Sunset (1976) and Lolita (1955), his best-known novel.

Michael Scammell is the author of Solzhenitsyn, a Biography, which won the Los Angeles Times and English PEN’s prizes for best biography after its publication. He is the editor of The Solzhenitsyn Files, Unofficial Art from the Soviet Union, and Russia’s Other Writers, and has translated Nabokov, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and other Russian authors into English. His reviews and articles have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, Harpers, and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing and translation in the School of the Arts at Columbia University in New York.Michael Scammell has been shortlisted for the LA Times biography prize.