Nikolay Kononov was born in Moscow in 1980. He studied journalism and political philosophy and worked as a reporter and editor for independent media outlets in Russia. He made his literary debut in TextOnly magazine in 2009 with the story Islands and Dreams. Kononov is the author of the nonfiction books God Without a Machine (2011) and The Durov Code (2012), as well as the novels Uprising (2019) and The Night We Disappeared (2022). Kononov lives in Berlin. His works have been translated into French, German, Hungarian, and English, and his short stories and essays have appeared in prose collections and publications such as NYT, Lettre, and Neue Zürcher Zeitung, among others.