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Yury Valentinovich Trifonov (; 28 August 1925 - 28 March 1981) was a leading representative of the so-called Soviet "urban prose", a 1970s movement inspired by the psychologically complicated works of Anton Chekhov and his 20th-century American followers. He was considered a close contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981.

Trifonov was born in the luxurious apartments on the Arbat Street and, with a two-year interval in Tashkent, spent his whole life in Moscow. His father, Valentin Trifonov (1888-1938), was of Don Cossack descent. A Red Army veteran who commanded Cossacks in the Don during the civil was and later served as a Soviet official, he was arrested on 21/22 June 1937 and shot on 15 March 1938. He was rehabilitated on 3 November 1955.

Trifonov's mother, Evgeniya Abramovna Lurie (1904-1975), an engineer and accountant, spent eight years in prison for not denouncing her husband. She was allowed to return to Moscow in 1946. Later in life, she wrote children's books under the name E. Tayurina. She was half Russian and half Jewish.

During their mother's imprisonment, Trifonov and his sister were raised by their maternal grandmother, Tatyana Aleksandrovna Lurie (nee. Slovatinskaya, 1879...1957), who had been a professional revolutionary and took part in the civil war. His maternal grandfather, Abram Pavlovich Lurie (1875...1924), had been a member of an underground Menshevik group.

After the purge, Trifonov's family moved from the famous House on Embankment (just across the river from the Kremlin), into a sordid kommunalka.

At school, Trifonov edited class newspapers, composed poetry and wrote short stories. He spent 1941 and 1942 in Tashkent, capital of the Uzbek SSR. During the war, in 1942-45, he worked as a fitter in a factory in Moscow. In 1945, he edited the factory's newspaper.

Trifonov attended a literary institute between 1944 and 1949. His first novel, The Students (1950), won him the Stalin Prize. Trifonov's subsequent works treated such topics as moral ambivalence of Soviet intelligentsia and tragic vicissitudes of Cossackdom during the Russian Civil War.

Trifonov's best regarded and most widely read pieces are half a dozen "Muscovite novellas": Exchange (1969), Preliminary Conclusions (1970), The Long Good-Bye (1971), Another Life (1975), and (most importantly) House on the Embankment (1976). These works are ranked among the most stylish, richly textured and aesthetically satisfying written in the Soviet period.

He was married from 1949 to 1966 to Nina Alekseevna Nelina, the daughter of a well-known artist and herself an opera singer. The marriage was ended by Nelina's death. In 1951, they had a daughter, Olga, who now lives in Düsseldorf, Germany.

In 1968, he married Anna Pavlovna Pastukhova, an editor. In 1975, he married for a third time, to Olga Romanovna Miroshnichenko (b. 1938), a writer formerly married to the writer Georgy S. Beryozko. Their son, Valentin Yurievich Trifonov, was born in 1979.

He died in 1981, aged 55, from a pulmonary embolism after an operation to remove a kidney. He is buried in Moscow's Kuntsevsky cemetery.

Olga Miroshnichenko-Trifonova subsequently published her late husband's diaries and notebooks, going back to the writer's schooldays and ending in 1980. She published her memoirs of Trifonov in 2003.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Yury Trifonov", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0