Born in 1963, Berseneva graduated from the Faculty of Journalism at the Belarusian State University in 1985. She completed her postgraduate studies at the Gorky Literary Institute (Moscow) in 1989, specializing in literary theory and holds a doctorate in philology. From 1990-2020, she was a lecturer at the Gorky Literary Institute (Moscow). Since 2022, he has been a professor at the Free University (registered in Latvia, declared an undesirable organization in Russia). She has published numerous critical and literary articles in literary journals (e.g. Kontinent, Znamia, Voprosy literatury, Literaturnoe obozrenie) and in publications such as Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Russian Writers. Since 2016, she has written about literature for various media outlets. Since 2024, she has been writing a weekly column about literature for Boris Akunin’s site, Babook. Since 1995, under the literary pseudonym Anna Berseneva, she has published 45 psychological novels with the Russian publishing houses Eksmo and AST, selling more than 5 million copies in total. The novels are set in the present day, which they weave together with crucial events in twentieth-century Russian and world history (including the Russian Revolution, the Second World War, the Khrushchev Thaw, and others) through family stories. The novel Rhine Gold (Reinskoe zoloto, 2023) is the first Russian-language novel set during Russia’s full-scale attack on Ukraine. It was published simultaneously by the Canadian publishing house Litsvet, the Israeli publishing house Kniga Sefer and the Ukrainian publishing house Drukarsky Dvir Olega Fedorova. 15 of Berseneva’s novels have been adapted into films in Russia based on the author’s scripts. In collaboration with her husband, writer Vladimir Sotnikov, she wrote original scripts for the TV series “Orlova and Alexandrov”, “Vangelia”, “Personal Circumstances” and others. Four novels have been translated into Slovak and Bulgarian. Member of PEN-International. Since 2020, she has been living in Germany. In 2022, she was declared a “foreign agent” in Russia.