English

Daria Dotsuk was born in Almaty, Kazakhstan in 1990. She is a children’s and YA fiction writer, blogger and journalist. She also teaches creative writing at Write Like a Grrrl Russia. Her most acclaimed YA novel Golos (Voice) published by Samokat in 2017 is IBBY Selection for Outstanding Books for Young People with Disabilities-2019, it has been translated and published in Slovenia as Glas (Mladinska Knjiga, 2022), and staged in Saint-Petersburg and Novokuznetsk dramatic theatres in Russia.

She holds a degree in International Journalism and Public Relations from MGIMO-University (Moscow, Russia) and a certificate in Children’s Books and Literature from Institute of Contemporary Art Moscow.

She speaks Russian, English, Spanish, and currently studies French.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Golos (Voice), Samokat, Russia, 2017

Glas (Voice), translated by Daša Cerar, Mladinska Knjiga, Slovenia, 2022

A teenage girl witnesses a terrorist attack in the Moscow Metro and develops acute post-traumatic stress disorder. To cope with her trauma she moves to Kaliningrad (formerly Königsberg) to stay with her grandmother, where she finds ways to heal through literature and new friends in this city with a tragic past.

Dotsuk published an impressive YA novel, Voice (Golos), in 2017, which chronicles the experiences of a teenage girl who witnesses a bombing in the Moscow subway. The striking cover image* of Voice, which brought the novel many readers and Instagram fame, hints at the trauma and isolation the novel’s hero faces after the blast and subsequent relocation to her grandmother’s house in Kaliningrad (formerly Königsberg). In response to the trauma of experiencing a terrorist attack, the protagonist literally loses her voice. The process of regaining her voice through literature and art serves as a metaphor to the literary process in Russia today, in which contemporary writers give voice to the experiences of children and teens following the collective social trauma of the 1990s.

“Growing Out of Communism: Russian Literature for Children and Teens, 1991–2017” by Andrea Lanoux, Kelly Herold, Olga Bukhina. Published by Brill Schöningh, Germany, 2022

*cover image by Vlada Myakonkina

Foreign rights representation by Evgeniya Ekadomova, Genya aGency / www.genyagency.ru. Email: genya@genyagency.ru