Ekaterina Manoylo was born in 1988 in Orsk, the city in Russia close to Kazakhstan, in an interethnic family, with a Kazakh father and a Russian mother. Manoylo graduated from the Literary Institute in Moscow in 2022. Her debut novel, Dad Faces the West, won the Alexander Pushkin’s Litsei Award for young writers in both the best prose and the critics’ choice nominations in 2022, before its publication as a book. The novel sold in impressive 40,000 copies in less than a year since its release. On publication, the novel was shortlisted for the Yasnaya Polyana Prize and longlisted for the Big Books Award in 2023.

As Ekaterina herself tells in the interviews, the idea of the debut novel came to her after she, just like the protagonist of the book, had to return to her native town to sort out inheritance issues after the funeral of her estranged father.

Manoylo’s second novel, The Wind Carries Away the Dead Leaves, a road thriller about two sisters escaping from an abusive father, was published by Alpina Non-Fiction Publishers in early 2024.

Ekaterina is married, with three daughters, a dog and a cat.