Ludmila Ulicka is a novelist, also writing scripts for films and theatre. Her profession is a genetic biologist. Ulicka’s debut story, “Sonetshka” of 1992, was nominated for the Booker Award in 1993, then won the prestigious Medici Award (France) for the best foreign story and the Giuseppe Azerbi Award (Italy). The story was staged at MCHAT a few years later. In 1996 she published her first novel ‘Medea and Her Children”. Her first and only play Russian Confitures has been extremely successful, especially in Germany. It is a wonderfully written, ironic, witty story, stylistically a variation on Czechov’s plays. The story is about the Russian intelligentsia in modern times, their strenuous and at the same time grotesque efforts at reconciling tradition and values of the old world with the requirements of the epoch of ‘businessmen’.