Maxim Osipov

Maxim Ossipow, born in 1963 in Moscow, is a writer and cardiologist. He studied medicine at the Russian National Research Medical University and worked as a research fellow at the University of California, San Francisco, in the early 1990s. After returning to Moscow, he practiced as a physician, co-authored a textbook on clinical cardiology, and founded the publishing house Practica, specializing in medical, musical, and theological works.

In 2005, Ossipow moved to Tarusa, a small town 150 kilometers south of Moscow, where he began working at the local hospital and established a charitable foundation to support and improve local healthcare services. He lived and worked there until March 2022, when he left Russia following the invasion of Ukraine. He first traveled to Armenia, then to Germany, and eventually settled in the Netherlands, where he currently lives.

Ossipow’s literary career began in 2007 with lyrical essays about his experiences in Tarusa, published in the journal Znamya. Since then, he has published several collections of prose and nonfiction and received numerous literary awards. His works have been translated into 20 languages. His first English-language collection, Rock, Paper, Scissors and Other Stories (translated by Boris Dralyuk, Alex Fleming, and Anne Marie Jackson), was published by NYRB Classics in 2019, followed by the German edition of Kilometer 101 (translated by Birgit Veit) in 2021.

His works continue to receive broad recognition across Europe. Since early 2022, Ossipow has been publishing the literary magazine The 5th Wave.