Sergei Lebedev

Sergei Lebedew, born in 1981 in Moscow, is a writer, poet, and journalist. He comes from a family of Soviet geologists – early expeditions to abandoned mines led him to traces of the Gulag and shaped his literary engagement with memory, trauma, and forgetting. His widely translated debut novel Predel‘ sabwenija (Der Himmel auf ihren Schultern, 2013 in German) brought him international recognition. In it, a young man – drawing on the author’s own experiences – investigates the crimes of Stalinism. In Nein! Stimmen aus Russland gegen den Krieg (2025), he compiles contributions from Russian intellectuals who condemn the war of aggression against Ukraine. In August 2025, Die Beschützerin will be published – a European novel exploring the prehistory of the war in Ukraine. Since 2018, he has lived and worked in Potsdam.