A.D. Miller
A. D. Miller studied literature at Cambridge and Princeton. His first novel, Snowdrops – a study in moral degradation set in modern Russia – was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the James Tait Black Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Awards, the CWA Gold Dagger and the Galaxy National Book Awards, and was longlisted for the IMPAC award. It has been translated into twenty-five languages. His second novel, The Faithful Couple, a story of friendship and remorse, was published in 2015. He is also the author of The Earl of Petticoat Lane, an acclaimed memoir of immigration, class, the Blitz and the underwear industry that was shortlisted for the Wingate prize.
A.D. Miller has been The Economist's Moscow correspondent, political columnist, writer-at-large and correspondent in the American South; in 2018 he became the magazine's culture editor. In 2014 he won Travel Story of the Year at the FPA Media Awards, for a piece about 24 hours at a motorway service station. He has been shortlisted three times for the David Watt Prize, for another FPA Award and for Political Commentator of the Year and Magazine Commentator of the Year at the Comment Awards. He has also written for the Financial Times, Guardian, Observer, Daily Telegraph, Independent, Spectator, Literary Review, Evening Standard, Intelligent Life and 1843. He uses his initials because another novelist already had his name.
“His suit smelled of cigarettes and Breznev”
“...the thirty-something zone of disappointment, the time when momentum and ambition start to fade and friends parents start to die.”
“From above you could see the chaos of entangled plots on the other side of the road, and a couple of tough tethered goats, and the glint of a frozen pond somewhere in the trees. Above them the sun was shining vaguely through the milky November sky, old but strong. In April – between the thaw and the jungly green explosion of summer – or in raw mid-October, I bet the same view would have been barren and depressing. But when we stood there all the bits of old tractors and discarded refrigerators, the shoals of empty vodka bottles and dead animals that tend to litter the Russian countryside were invisible, smothered by the annual oblivion of the snow. The snow let you forget the scars and blemishes, like temporary amnesia for a bad conscience.”
“Those days when our watch sees to take lazy age over each minute, and there is always so much time left, so little passed, since the last time you looked. And then at the end, when you're suddenly nervous and want to back out, the time goes in a rush and it's now.”
“That's what I learned when my last Russian winter thawed. The lesson wasn't about Russia. It never is, I don't think, when a relationship ends. It isn't your lover that you learn about. You learn about yourself.”
“could tell that one of the Russian proverbs he loved was on the way. ‘The only place with free cheese is a mousetrap”