Dimitri Bortnikov

Dimitri Bortnikov is a Russian-born French writer. Born in Samara in 1968, he had a rather eventful youth: his medical studies interrupted by the then-mandatory military service in the Soviet Army and later by the fall of the Soviet Union, he had worked as a nurse, a librarian and a dance teacher, before leaving Russia to join the French Foreign Legion (for a short while) and finally settling in Paris and working as a cook for an old Russian countess.

Bortnikov lives in Paris since 1999, where he is a full-time writer.

His first novel, “Syndrom Fritza” (“The Fritz Syndrom”), was published by Limbus Press, Saint-Petersburg, in 2002 and was a finalist for the Russian Booker Prize and the National Bestseller Award. It was published in France in 2012 by Editions Noir sur Blanc (“Le Syndrôme de Fritz”).

His second novel, “Svinobourg” (Amphora, Saint-Petersburg, 2003), was translated into the French and published by Le Seuil in 2005 to critical acclaim.

His third novel “Spiaschaya Krasavitsa” (“Sleeping Beauty”) came out from Prestige Kniga, Moscow, in 2005. It will be published in France by Noir sur Blanc in 2021 (“La Belle endormie”).

In 2008, Bortnikov published his first work written in French, a novella called “Furioso” (Editions MF).

In 2011, Editions Allia, Paris, published Bortnikov’s first novel written in French, “Repas de morts”, unanimously saluted by the critics. It is due to come out in Italy in 2020 from Tunué Romanzi (“Il Cibo dei Morti”) and being translated into English for a Fall 2020 release, under the title Soul Catcher (Betimes Books, Ireland).

In 2017, Bortnikov comes back with a second novel in French, the epic “Face au Styx” (“Facing the Styx”) and wins the Best French Novel of the Year Prize of the Lire Magazine.

Betimes Books, a non-profit literary publisher based in Dublin, Ireland, published in December 2020 the first English translation of a work by Dimitri Bortnikov, SOUL CATCHER (original title: "Repas de mort").

French critics about the novel:

“A modern Inferno.” —Les Inrocks

“… A poetic and visceral survival guide, of which each sentence, each word, each dot even, adds a star to the heavenly vault we all carry in ourselves. […] Dazzlingly inventive.” —Le Télérama

“This sublime text has rhythmic power, incantatory energy, insolent humour.” —Le Monde

“In the tradition of Céline, Calaferte et Jauffret, Bortnikov signs a literary objet that is truly disconcerting, carried by a bitter, syncopated language that devours everything along the way. […] Iconoclastic.” —Lire Magazine

“Better than a novel, a long feverish blues full of ghosts, sorrows and hungry dogs. We get lost, we drown, and we don’t care…” —Le Nouvel Observateur

“A masterpiece. It happens sometimes that a text, from the first sentence, puts you into a state of astonishment that will not leave you until the end and convinces you that you are reading one of those major works of fiction that will mark you forever.” —TechnikArt

“This strange novel – partly autobiographical – is built as a succession of reminiscences and dreamlike images of the steppe, the tundra and Paris. But no matter what the story is – what matters here is the power of his writing, harsh and infused with venomous poetry.” —L’Express

“Here is an animist prosopopeia. Here is an ardent work.” —Tristan Felix

“Bortnikov’s audacity verges on genius. A constant verbal insurrection.” —Gonzai

“Powerful, paroxysmal, his prose doesn’t resemble anyone else’s.” —Livres Hebdo

“Language plays a crucial role there, with that breathless rhythm that follows the narrator’s hallucinated thoughts.” —Euranet.eu

“With its breath-taking prose and and its tenebrous beauty, Repas de morts is a literary uppercut. Radical, exhilarating, a joy of reading of a rare intensity.” —Transfuge