Official website of the President of Russia

The 2012 Russian Federation National Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Humanitarian Field has been awarded to writer Valentin Rasputin.

Valentin Rasputin, born on March 15, 1937 in the village of Ust-Uda, Irkutsk Region.

He graduated from the Irkutsk University’s Department of History and Linguistics in 1959 and has been a professional writer since 1966.

Valentin Rasputin is a classic of Russian literature. His works are distinguished by the strength and depth of vision, vivid characters and acute issues. The short story Money for Maria brought Rasputin fame in the late 1960s. The stories Deadline, Live and Remember, and Farewell to Matyora, written in the 1970s, secured his reputation as a brilliant representative of the village prose style, a leading movement in modern Russian literature. The themes that have dominated Rasputin’s prose since the 1980s include the environment, moral values, literary criticism and other topical issues of our time (The Fire, short story cycles, essays and articles, and chapters in the book of essays Siberia, Siberia.). His work reflects the most acute problem of the late 20^th century: the destruction of nature and morality through the impact of civilisation.

Hero of Socialist Labour (1987), Rasputin has received Soviet and Russian orders. He is a winner of the State Prize of the USSR, the Russian Federation Presidential Prize in Literature and Arts, the Russian Government Prize in Culture, the International Dostoevsky Prize, the Solzhenitsyn Prize and the Aksakov Russian Literary Prize.