She was born into a family of rich literary tradition. Her paternal grandfather was Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoi, an important Russian-Soviet writer known as 'the Red Count', author of Peter I (???? ??????) and other novels. His wife Natalia Krandievskaya was an influential poet. The grandfather on the maternal side was a literary translator, Mikhail Lozinsky. Tatyana Tolstaya's sister Natalia Tolstaya was a writer as well. Her son, Artemy Lebedev, is the founder and owner of Art. Lebedev Studio, the first and best-known Web design studio in Russia.

Tolstaya received her education at the department of classical philology of the Leningrad State University. She moved to Moscow in the early 1980s and started working in the Nauka publishing house. Her first short story, "On a Golden Porch" (?? ?????? ??????? ??????), appeared in Avrora magazine in 1983 and marked the start of Tolstaya's literary career.

Tolstaya's novel The Slynx/Kys (????, 2000) is a dystopian novel filled with literary allusions. Several collections of short stories by Tatyana Tolstaya are popular all over Russia, and she is regarded by many as one of the foremost writers of today.

Tatyana Tolstaya is the co-host of a very successful Russian TV show The School for Scandal (????? ?????????), where she interviews representatives of Russian culture and politics. Her yearly schedule is divided between the US, where she spends half of the year lecturing at a university, and Russia.

In translation

• On the Golden Porch, and other stories Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1989, then Penguin, 1990, ISBN 0-14-012275-3.
• The Slynx New York Review of Books Classics, 2007, ISBN 1-59017-196-9
• White Walls New York Review of Books Classics, 2007, ISBN 1-59017-197-7

• The American band Okkervil River take their name from one of her stories. It is also a name of a river in St. Petersburg.

Online texts

• Kys, some short stories and essays in full text from lib.ru
• The short story "See the other side" in english translation in The New Yorker
• The short story "Yorick" in english translation in The New Yorker

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