Short answers, pulled from the story.
Victor Pelevin is a Russian fiction writer born in Moscow on the 22nd of November 1962. He is known for postmodernist novels that blend Buddhist philosophy, pop culture satire, and science fiction, and was voted the most influential intellectual in Russia in a 2009 OpenSpace.ru survey.
Over 3.5 million copies of Generation P have been sold worldwide since its 1999 publication. The novel also won Germany's Richard Schoenfeld Prize and circulated in English under the titles Babylon and Homo Zapiens.
Pelevin has won multiple awards including the Russian Little Booker Prize in 1993 for The Blue Lantern, the Apollon Grigoryev Prize in 2003, the National Bestseller award in 2004, and the Andrew White Prize for iPhuck 10 in 2017. He was also nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2011.
Pelevin graduated from the Moscow Power Engineering Institute in 1985 with a degree in electromechanical engineering and was hired as an engineer by MPEI's Department of Electrical Transport. He also served in the Russian Air Force and attended MPEI graduate school from 1987 to 1989 before turning to writing.
Pelevin is known for avoiding the literary scene and granting few interviews; when he does speak publicly, he discusses the nature of his mind rather than his books. He has no social media accounts and in May 2011 failed to appear at an award ceremony that was announced as his first public appearance.
Pelevin's prose mixes postmodernism, Buddhist symbolism, absurdism, and satire, weaving the fantastic with the real and the historical with the fictional. His early work merged postmodernism with Buddhism and ironic political critique; his later work criticizes postmodernism's lack of grand narratives and incorporates humanist philosophy.