Nezavisimaya gazeta wrote: 'A beautiful, powerful and fascinating book which will become a milestone not only in the history of Russian literature but in the development of Russian self-awareness.'

In 2000 the novel won Russian Booker Prize for the best Russian novel of the year. In 1999, Znamya published Shishkin's breakthrough novel The Taking of Izmail. Fred Kaplan called Mikhail Shishkin in Boston Globe 'one of Moscow´s most wellregarded young novelists'. His first publications attracted the attention of literary critics and Shishkin received the Prize for the Best Debut of the Year. Later this novel was published under the title Larionov's Reminiscences / Записки Ларионова. His first novel One Night Befalls Us All ( Omnes una manet nox) / Всех ожидает одна ночь also appeared the same year in Znamya. Shishkin has published articles in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Le Monde, The Independent, and other media outlets. He is a frequent guest lecturer at universities and cultural foundations across Europe and the United States and a frequent speaker on Television and Radio in many countries. Shishkin was a guest of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program in Berlin from 2012 to 2013. Since 2011 Shishkin has lived with his family in a small village of Kleinlützel near Basel. Shishkin was invited as a guest professor to Washington and Lee University in Lexington (VA) (fall semester 20). He worked in Zürich within the Immigration Department and specifically with refugees as a Russian and German translator. In 1995, Shishkin moved to Switzerland for family reason. After the graduation from Moscow State Pedagogical Institute, where Shishkin studied German and English, he worked as a road worker, a street sweeper, journalist, school teacher, and translator.

Maidenhair by Mikhail Shishkin