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Vadim Babenko was born in Russia. He has lived in Moscow, Washington D.C., and Madrid. In the late eighties his seminal poetry was well-received by educated Muscovites for its ingenuity and singularity. Most of his early work was included in "To Gudwin and Kate", his first poetry collection published in 1994 in Moscow.
Vadim has a Ph. D. degree from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and had a very successful career as a top scientist working in theoretical physics, artificial intelligence, molecular biology, and genetic engineering. In 1992 he relocated to the U.S., where he co-founded a multi-million-dollar high-tech business that was listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange. Yet he left behind both his scientific and business careers in order to pursue his true passion, serious literature.
His next poetry book, "The Twin", coming into being in 1996. Since it was published and distributed in the U.S., it hardly reached Russian readers. Later he published another florilegium of poetry that contains the best pieces (carefully revised by the author) from the earlier books and some poems he had never published before. The author considers this book, "The Refuge for the Stunned Ark", the only "official" collection of his early poetry. It was published almost simultaneously in Moscow and Tel-Aviv in 2001. New poems written within the last two years have not yet been published but may also be found at this site.
Since 1996 he has dedicated himself to larger literary forms that combine a poetic structure with a fully developed plot typical of prose. The result has been two books - "In The Unnamed Seas" and "Buenos Aires" - which were published in Moscow in 2001-2002.
Then the author moved on to "pure" prose. His first full-scale novel, "The Black Pelican", was completed in 2004 and published in Moscow at the beginning of 2006. In the year 2007 "The Black Pelican" made short list of the "National Bestseller" award and was also nominated to the "Big Book" award. These are the two most important literary awards in Russia. His second novel, "A Simple Soul" was published in Russia in 2009 and was named to the long lists of both “The National Bestseller Award” and “The Big Book Award” in 2010. At present Vadim is working on an English-language version of his third novel, "Semmant", the story of a brilliant cyberneticist and his even-more-brilliant robot who falls in love, only to learn the true pain of the “human” experience.
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