Nataliya Meshchaninova, born in 1982, is an acclaimed Russian film director. She has written screenplays for numerous feature films and TV shows, including Another Year (2014), Arrhythmia (2017), Anna’s War (2018), and Storm (2019). Meshchaninova made her directorial debut in 2014 with The Hope Factory, which follows a group of troubled twenty-somethings in the industrial town of Norilsk. Her feature film Anna’s War received the best film award from all major national film prizes.

The autobiographical book Stories of a Life is Meshchaninova’s first prose work. Originally written as a series of viral Facebook posts, then released as a cult hit in St. Petersburg, Meshchaninova’s memoir-novel was nominated for the 2018 Russian National Bestseller Prize and became a finalist for the 2018 New Literature Award, receiving a heated response from the critical community and readers alike. Today it is almost unanimously considered a pillar of the #metoo movement in Russia.