Andrei Ivanov is a Russian prose writer living in Tallinn, laureate of the NOS Prize and finalist for the Russian Booker Prize. His main subject is the life and existence of emigrants: both present-day illegal migrants trying by fair means or foul to gain a foothold in Scandinavia, and those forced to flee the revolution for Estonia in the 1920s and 1930s («Harbin Moths»).
His new novel «Confession of a Sleepwalker», which concludes his “Scandinavian trilogy” («Hanuman’s Journey to Lolland», «Bizarre»), is a metaphysical odyssey of bodies and souls whose voluntary descent into hell has dragged on, while finding the way back grows ever harder.
The protagonist—Yevgeny, Eugene—has managed to break out of the labyrinth of Danish refugee camps, gone through several prisons, escaped from a psychiatric clinic, and is now trying to free himself from the obsessive phantoms of the past…