My Story

My earliest years began in Andijan, in the warmth and colour of Central Asia, where I was the eldest of two children.

My mother taught German at high school, while my father played chess and believed that life was meant to be lived in motion. We changed homes frequently, which perhaps explains why crossing from one country to another eventually became something of a lifelong habit.

Writing has been my passion since early childhood. I started off as a poet, getting my work published in a Kazakhstani newspaper before deciding that rhymes and long stanzas were better left in my high school yearbooks. With the swirls of poetic ink drying, I turned confidently, and perhaps naively, towards prose. Yet poetry proved to be one of the defining patterns of my life. It never left me; it merely grew shorter, finding its way into haiku instead of long poems.

At one point, I was encouraged to attend Moscow’s literary university. Since I was too young and, apparently, far too precious to send away, my parents decided that writing was not a proper profession. Life, it turned out, had a strange sense of humour. Literature, they believed, could wait. So instead, I graduated from a Physics and Mathematics High School and went on to study Chemical Engineering at a university in Kazakhstan. 

After my first degree, I found myself working as a project engineer for a secret gold and uranium mining company linked to the defence industry. It was based in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, a city that became one of the great loves of my life. In retrospect, the organisation resembled a small Soviet version of Britain's Bletchley Park: a world of secrecy, restricted access, and hidden work. Perhaps that early experience explains why, many years later, I began writing a historical novel set at Bletchley Park.

I once took the entrance examination for the Film Studies Faculty at Moscow's Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography. Although I followed a different path, my interest in the stage never left me, which may explain why I now write plays alongside fiction.

Later, because one career clearly wasn't enough, I studied practical psychology. Over the years I have worked as an engineer, a psychologist, a commercial director for the American-Swedish company Computer Land, a photographer in China, and the owner of a homestay in a French village. Through it all, I have remained a lifelong observer of human nature.

Over the years, I have lived in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, China, France, and now Aotearoa New Zealand, while travelling far beyond them, collecting stories, questions, and new beginnings along the way. I also grew up hearing and speaking Uzbek, Kazakh, Tatar, Russian, German, French and eventually my favourite language, English. 

I wrote in Russian for many years before beginning to write in English about seven years ago. My work has appeared in literary magazines and anthologies, received awards, and was a finalist for the Open Eurasian Literary Festival & Book Forum in London.

For me, storytelling has always been a way of understanding people and the hidden threads that shape our lives. I explore the inner landscapes we carry within us, along with the journeys that bring us home to ourselves. 

My curiosity has also led me into web design. In France, I created the website Soulfoodia for my homestay. Later, after moving to New Zealand, I designed another website for a client, long before building my own literary world, New DesireLand. People often ask where the name New DesireLand came from. Its story begins with a little boy named Ilyashka and a phrase that followed me across countries and years. 

 ✨ The Boy Who Named a Country