Pioneer Summer

Elena Malisova was born in a provincial Soviet town in the late 1980s, where she lived until she moved to Moscow in the late 2000s. Growing up, she wrote poems that were published in small local newspapers. Sylvanova and Malisova met in 2016 and together began working on Pioneer Summer. In 2022, amid a wave of death threats both authors were receiving, Elena left Russia. She currently lives in Germany. Kateryna Sylvanova was born in Kharkiv, Ukraine. After graduating from university, she moved to Russia, where she worked in a shoe store and spent her free time writing. In 2022, after Russia began its full-scale war against Ukraine, Kateryna left Russia and returned to Kharkiv. Anne O. Fisher's most recent translation is Ukraine,War, Love: A Donetsk Diary by Ukrainian writer, journalist, and historian Olena Stiazhkina. Fisher and her husband, Derek Mong, are the incoming coeditors of the literary journal At Length. Read more at www.anneofisher.com. She condemns Putin’s ongoing war of aggression on Ukraine.

“[Pioneer Summer] sensitively charts the process of falling in love for the first time. The relationship between Yury and Volodya, blossoming in difficult circumstances, is tenderly described. It is, at heart, a classic story of young love triumphing, however briefly, against the odds . . . The book is more than a breakout hit. It is also the catalyst for the latest legislative assault on L.G.B.T.Q. rights in Russia.”