Jana Bakunina

Description

Part of the Words in Walden Festival 2025

Jana Bakunina is a Russian-born Londoner. Brought up in Yekaterinburg, she came to Britain in 1999 to study Economics & Management at Oxford. After a career in the City and in media, she wrote a memoir, Bird’s Milk, about growing up in the Soviet Union and moving to the West. Her collection of short stories, Stories by a Russian Londoner explores the ways in which political events mould our identities, challenge our beliefs and redefine our relationships, drawing from her first-hand experience with Russia. Her short stories were longlisted for the 2021 and the 2022 Fish Publishing Prize, shortlisted for the 2022 Bridport Prize, and she was a finalist for the 2022 London Independent Short Story Prize.

Her latest book, The Good Russian is an insight into the hearts and minds of ordinary people in Putin’s Russia. Told through the eyes of her friends and family in Russia, it is both a deeply personal and objective look at what the people who live and work in Russia are thinking and feeling.

When Putin invaded Ukraine, Jana felt furious, ashamed, but most of all helpless. A year later she travelled to her home city of Yekaterinburg to see how ordinary Russians viewed the conflict – and whether the soul of her nation had truly been crushed.

Jana finds a booming city seemingly untouched by war. Reconnecting with old friends, she discovers people either happy to go along with a regime that has brought them stability, or staying out of politics. Most painful of all, her once liberal father has channelled his personal disappointments into becoming a firm fan of Putin.