Vladimir Sorokin is the author of fifteen novels, including Day of the Oprichnik, The Blizzard, Ice Trilogy, and The Queue, as well as numerous plays, short stories, and screenplays. He wrote the libretto for Leonid Desyatnikov's The Children of Rosenthal, the first opera to be commissioned by the Bolshoi Theater in a quarter century. His books have been translated into thirty languages, and he has won the Andrei Bely and the Maxim Gorky prizes. In 2013, Sorokin was a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize.