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Mikhail Shishkin is a prominent author of fiction and essays. His work has been recognized with multiple awards, including the Russian Booker, the National Bestseller Prize, the Big Book Prize, and, most recently, the Italian Strega Prize. He is a long-standing and outspoken critic of the Putin regime whose essays have been published in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Le Monde, and elsewhere. Since 1995, he has lived and worked in Switzerland.