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Biography
"Nick" is the English short-term for Nikolai(pronounced: nee-koh-LIE). Last name "Perumov" comes from a powerful Armenian noble family. When Armenia bacame part of the Russian Empire, Armenian noble families were all inducted into Russian nobility. The founder of the Perumov family came to Russia in the beginning of the XIX century. Luckily, neither during the Red Terror, nor any time later,
no one in the Perumov family was persecuted, even though his mothers' family ancestors were also belonging to gentry, who have come to such noble status from the times before Peter the Great. Nick's paternal grandfather was included into the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia, his maternal grandfather was a professor and a chairman of the department in a St.-Petersburg University. His textbooks are still widely used.
Nikolai Perumov himself was born Novermber 21, 1963. He began creating his first literary works already in his highschool years. Having graduated in biophysics from the physico-mechanical department of the Leningrad Polytechnical Institute, he stated working in the field of molecular biology and has spent 10 years working in the Leningrad Scientific Reasearch Institute of Particularily Pure Biopreparations, untill he has taken up literature as his main profession. Some might say that his try-out in the field of literature was "almost coincidential". In the beginning of the 80-s, Nikolai, like many others "physico-lyrics" of that time was "crazy about Tolkien". When "Hobbit" first came out in Russian, and after that - the first volume of "The Lord of the Rings" - "The Fellowship of the Ring", he used his connections with friendly commodity traders and publishers to get the rest of Tolkien's works in English and has personally translated them. (Due to this, he mastered English so well that he began working as a synchronous translator, as a part-time job!) It was then, when he realized that he is not able to stop and must keep on living in this fantasy world. He took a clear sheet of paper, put it in the typewriter and started typing his ideas of how it all might continue. Perumov himself called it a "literary game". So came about the trilogy entitled "The Ring of Darkness". It was written by Nick for himself and his friends, and was destined to spend the rest of its life, lying the drawer of Nick's writing table. But by pure accident, the manuscript got into the hands of the owner of a computer company. It was in 1991, when computer trade just began. The man used to sell computers to a publishing company from the city of Stavropol called "Kavkazskaya Biblioteka"("Library of Caucasus") and so he offered them to read the manuscript. They kept thinking it over for a long time, almost for 2 years, and finally published the first book in "The Ring of Darkness" trilogy. Eventually the publishing rights got transferred to publishing house "Severo-Zapad"("North-West"). The novel provoked quite a diverse range of opinions. It's readers got divided into 2 camps: passionate supporters and furious opponents, who even now, many years after the publishing, cannot forgive Nick for "daring to partake in Tolkien's fame".
After 9 years of writing, Nick Perumov has created 19 novels with a total circulation of more that a million copies, which is a record for a fantasy writer in Russia. 4 more novels has been published under an assumed name, which the author adamantly refuses to reveal. Currently Nick is residing in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he writes his books and is working at a scientific institution in his main profession - as a biologist. |
