Andreï Makine was born in Krasnoyarsk in Siberia in 1957, but sought asylum in France in 1987. While initially sleeping rough in Paris he was writing his first novel, A Hero's Daughter, which was eventually published in 1990 after Makine pretended it had been translated from the Russian, since no publisher believed he could have written it in French. With his third novel, Once Upon A River Love, he was finally published as a 'French' writer, and with his fourth, Le Testament Francais, he became the first author to win both of France's top literary prizes, the Prix Goncourt and Prix Médicis. Since then Andreï Makine has written The Crime of Olga Arbyelina, Requiem for the East, A Life's Music, which won the Grand Prix RTL-Lire, and The Earth and Sky of Jacques Dorme.