Mikhail Shishkin was born in Moscow.
He debuted as a writer in 1993 and has received several of the biggest Russian and international literary prizes.
With the war in Ukraine, he feels a great shame for his homeland, which he believes is doing everything to get rid of the all-important critical mass - writers, artists, performers and others - who do not dance to Putin's pipe.
- All my life I have had a stable foundation to stand on - Russian culture was my foundation.
But something strange has happened in the past year.
Suddenly it feels empty underfoot, he says.
Last visit to Russia
Shishkin remembers the last time he visited Russia.
He was at the book fair in Krasnoyarsk.
This was 2014, the year Russia annexed Crimea.
But despite the fact that there was already a war going on in Ukraine at the time, no one but him wanted to talk about it, the author believes.
- It was so embarrassing and humiliated.
Then I understood that I did not want to return to this silence, he says.
Shishkin believes that many Russians unfortunately live in the past.
- Time has run away from them.
They have an image of a nice Russia, surrounded by enemies - NATO, Ukraine who want to destroy "us", he says.
Not just the language of killers
Mikhail Shishkin notes that Russian culture has taken a big hit due to Putin's war of aggression against Ukraine.
There, as a writer, he feels that he has an important task.
- It is our task now to show that Russian is not only the killer's language, just as the German language was never only Hitler's.