This event is a bi-lingual Russian-English reading by Mikhail Shishkin, an award-winning Russian writer based in Switzerland. Shishkin is considered one of the most important contemporary prose stylists in Russia. His work has been translated into many languages, including English. He is also a prolific author of cultural commentary in Russian and German. Shishkin's Maidenhair (Russian 2005, English trans. 2012) received two of Russia's most prestigious literature prizes and established him as the foremost prose writer of the 2000s, a place he has occupied ever since, receiving major acclaim for all of his subsequent work. Shishkin's writing is characterized by great stylistic plasticity and by complex experimentation with layered and polyphonic constructions of time and space.