Boris Akunin

Akunin has been critical of Vladimir Putin's domestic and foreign policies, including the annexation of Crimea in 2014. In 2012, Putin attributed Akunin's critical attitudes to his Georgian background.

In March 2013, Akunin announced in his blog that he was going to wind down his career in detective fiction (though he still plans to finish the Erast Fandorin series as promised) and begin concentrating his energy on a new big project, History of the Russian State. He plans to write eight volumes of history, from the Middle Ages to the Russian Revolution, aiming to make it completely "non-ideological" yet interesting to read. Accompanying each volume of history, there will be a book of fiction taking place in the same time period. All the fiction pieces will be parts of one, long family saga. The first part of the project was released in November, 2013. It includes two volumes, A Part of Europe (a volume of history, covering the period between the formation of the Kievan Rus in the 9th century and the beginning of the Mongol conquest of Russia in the 13th century) and The Fiery Finger (a collection of three novellas, set in the same time period). The second part was released in 2014, and the third part in 2015/2016.

In January 2012, two years after the second Brusnikin novel was published and just prior to the release of the third one, Chkhartishvili admitted in his blog that it was indeed him hiding under a new nom-de-plume. The reason for creating another alter ego was Akunin's desire to write historical novels without a mystery component and to attempt a "Slavophile" look at Russian history in lieu of his usual "Westerner" outlook. The Brusnikin "photograph" was revealed to be a combination of Chkhartishvili's face with the face of a studio designer who made the picture.

As Akunin has indicated in interviews, the Sister Pelagia series is finished (only three books were ever planned) and so, in all likelihood, is the Nicholas Fandorin series. The Alexei Romanov/Sepp von Theofels series, planned for 10 novellas, was completed in 2011. The other two projects will continue. In particular, Akunin plans to write two more Erast Fandorin books, both collections of short stories and novellas, similar in structure to The Jade Rosary and taking place entirely during the 20th century.

Additionally, Pelagia and the White Bulldog was made into a TV mini-series in 2009, while The Spy Novel came out in a 2011 theatrical release as The Spy.

An English remake of The Winter Queen was in production. It was set to start filming in 2007, but the leading actress, Milla Jovovich, became pregnant, and the production process was delayed to unknown date.

In November 2007, AST, one of the publishing houses with which Akunin is affiliated, came out with a historical mystery novel by a new author, Anatoly Brusnikin, called Девятный спас (Devyatny Spas, The Ninth Savior). Despite the fact that Brusnikin was a complete unknown, AST spent lavishly on an advertising campaign for the book, which almost immediately resulted in rumors that Brusnikin might actually be Akunin in a new disguise.

In 2003, the British Crime Writers' Association placed Akunin's novel The Winter Queen on the short list for the Dagger Award in Fiction. In 2004, he was a member of the jury at the 26th Moscow International Film Festival.

In the year of 2000, Akunin was nominated for the Smirnoff-Booker Prize. In September 2000, Akunin was named Russian Writer of the Year and won the "Antibooker" prize in 2000 for his Erast Fandorin novel Coronation, or the last of the Romanovs.

Under his given name of Grigory Chkhartishvili, he serves as editor-in-chief of the 20-volume Anthology of Japanese Literature, chairman of the board of a large "Pushkin Library " (Soros Fund), and is the author of the book The Writer and Suicide (Moscow, The New Literary Review, 1999). He has also contributed literary criticism and translations from Japanese, American and English literature under his own name. He is left handed, and has been known to smoke a pipe.

Chkhartishvili was born in Zestaponi to a Georgian father and a Jewish mother and lived in Moscow from 1958 until 2014. Since then he has lived between Britain, France and Spain. Influenced by Japanese Kabuki theatre, he joined the historical-philological branch of the Institute of Asian and African Countries of Moscow State University as an expert on Japan. He worked as assistant to the editor-in-chief of the magazine Foreign Literature, but left in October 2000 to pursue a career as a fiction writer.

Boris Akunin (Russian: Борис Акунин ) is the pen name of Grigori Chkhartishvili (Russian: Григорий Шалвович Чхартишвили ; Georgian: გრიგორი ჩხარტიშვილი ) (born 20 May 1956), a Russian writer. He is best known as writer of detective and historical fiction. He is also an essayist and literary translator. Grigory Chkhartishvili has also written under pen names Anatoly Brusnikin, Anna Borisova, and Akunin-Chkhartishvili.