Nina Viktorovna Gorlanova (Нина Викторовна Горланова) is a Russian short story writer and novelist. After studying philology at Perm University in the late 1960s, she remained in the city & worked at the Institute of Pharmacy and the Polytechnic Institute in the 1970s, before pivoting to teaching and working with children in a variety of vocations: as a librarian, a kindergarten teacher, an art therapist, and more. However, Nina Gorlanova is best known in her native Russia for her fiction writing.
Most of Gorlanova's novels and short stories are set in the isolated provincial city where she lives, a city which she describes with a combination of somberness & merriment. Her recurring themes are social misery and motherhood, but she strives to inject humorous moments in the daily lives of her characters -- who are primarily from working-class backgrounds -- describing the bonds that unite them, and the material hardships and ideological disagreements that characterize their existence in the Soviet era.
