About the Author

Ilya Pankratov

Ilya Pankratov was born in 1978 in Moscow. He graduated from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) in 2001 and the Institute of Natural Science and Ecology (INSE) and the Department of Nanotechnologies and Informatics of MIPT in 2006.

In 2004 he defended his PhD thesis on “The Theory of Kinetics and Thermodynamics of Phase Transformations of Ordering in Alloys” and was awarded a doctorate in physics. He has published many articles in scientific journals, beginning with the Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter in 1998. He also holds a doctorate in Business Administration from the American University of Business Administration.

He lives in Moscow, where he works at the Kurchatov Institute National Research Centre.

His main literary influences include J. R. R. Tolkien, Astrid Lindgren, Haruki Murakami and Alexander Ilichevski. In 2012, Pachydemonia won the Debut independent literary prize; it was published in 2014. Ilya Pankratov has written poetry since childhood. He first had the idea for writing a fictional tale about physics when he was at university.