Anatoly Golovkov was born in 1945 in Moscow. He grew up in Riga and studied trumpet at the Krasnoyarsk College of Arts. He continued playing music during his army service and later performed with various orchestras, concluding his musical career in the ensemble Ogni Baltiki ("Lights of the Baltics"). He is a prose writer, poet, and screenwriter. Golovkov gained recognition in 1987 through his publications in the magazine Ogonyok during the editorship of Vitaly Korotich. His essays have been collected in three anthologies, including Eternal Spark (Moscow: Pravda, 1989). He began writing stories and poems in the 1970s, with his first story published in 1977 in the literary almanac Istoki (Moscow: Molodaya Gvardiya). Since then, nearly all of his stories have been published in Russia and abroad. He is the author of several novels, including The Aeronaut (Moscow: Izograf, 2005; later revised as The Terrorists, 2020), Jam Session: Chronicles of a Visiting Musician, and The Victors Will Not Return (2020), as well as two culinary books and the children’s fairy tale Where Do Macaroni Grow? (Odessa: Dva Slona, 1993), which inspired the TV series Kotovasya ("Dixie", NTV, 1998). A member of the Writers’ Union since 1991, he is also the author of Don’t Go (New York: Franc-Tireur, 2016), winner of the "Silver Bullet" Award for Best Book of the Year; a poetry collection titled Syncopation; the novel The Cloakroom Attendant (a finalist for the Fazil Iskander Prize); and the story colle