Anya Ulinich
Anya Ulinich is one of sixty authors who attended The Press Christchurch Writers Festival from 4 to 7 September 2008
Anya Ulinich was born in 1973 in Moscow, but when she was 17, her family left the U.S.S.R. and for the United States. They arrived without money, visas or very much English.
“For me, coming from Russia to America coincided with growing up. I was seventeen when my family and I moved to Phoenix. Before, I’d lived in the same apartment in Moscow for my entire life. So when I came to the U.S., I was very wide-eyed, very naïve, and I was absolutely bowled over by the new world I’d entered, its attitudes, and my awkward place in it.”
Her first novel Petropolis deftly combines satirical wry humour with darker social observation, bleak surroundings and characters who, like her, are coping with moving from the restrictions of Soviet life to the equally strange life of Arizona U.S.A.
