Andrey Usachev: Author – Russia

a renaissance man—this is how one may describe Andrey Usachev, considering all fields of his thirty-year-long artistic activity. Born in 1958 in Moscow, he has been working as a poet; prose writer; playwright; educator; and writer of songs, musicals, and scripts for both the radio and television and is now one of the most popular personages in the area of children’s culture in Russia.

A turning point for his future career was his fourth year at the Moscow Institute of Electronics, when he decided to change his field of study for the Philological Faculty of Tver State University. In his master’s thesis he focused on Daniel Harm’s poetry for children. He started his own career writing poetry in 1985. In interviews, he states that it is poetry that he considers the most valuable artistic form in Russian children’s literature. Usachev’s poems focus to a large extent on words—their shape, multiple meanings, and the way they function in tradition and culture. Exploiting the “teaching through play” rule, he uses humor to introduce the child reader to the fascinating world of language in his books of poems. In ABC for Santa Claus or The Great Mighty Russian Language, readers are acquainted with Russian “winged words.” Already the title of the latter is a quote from Ivan Turgenev, a classic of nineteenth-century Russian literature.

As a prose writer, Usachev most frequently chooses the conventions of fantasy, creating both humorous works—such as tales about the merry Ded Moroz and his adult, serious, and principled granddaughter Snegurochka (All about Dedmorozovka)—as well as serious, even philosophical stories, such as Little Ant, Big Thinker or Where Does the Ocean End?

Usachev has won many prizes and awards, including Russian “The Book of the Year” prize in 2005 for the poetry collection 333 Cats. In the same year, he received The Golden Ostap Prize for his songs for children. In 2012, The Great Mighty Russian Language was nominated for the IBBY Honour List. Usachev’s books have been translated into a number of languages, including French, German, English, Chinese, Hebrew, and Polish.