Zahar Prilepin (his real name is Yevgenii Nikolaevich Prilepin) was born in 1975 into the family of a teacher and a nurse in Ilyinka Village of the Ryazan Region. He started working early, at the age of 16 – as a loader in a bakery shop. The future writer graduated from the Philological Faculty of the N.I. Lobachevsky Nizhny Novgorod University. He served in OMON and participated in military operations in Chechnya (1996, 1999) as a squad leader. His poems started to be published in 2003.

A member of the Nizhny Novgorod branch of the National Bolshevik Party, Prilepin participated in several dozens of political actions of the left-wing radical opposition.

Zahar Prilepin is the winner of Boris Sokolov Award 2004 and Prize of the Literary Russia Newspaper 2004.

The year 2005 saw the publication of his novel "Pathologies" dedicated to the war in Chechnya. It was followed by the novel San'kya, a story of a simple provincial fellow, who joins a youth revolutionary party. These two books, as well as Prilepin’s next novel in stories "The Sin" won the National Bestseller prize, and apart from rave reviews of literary critics, they drew a response of high readership. The novel San'kya also became the winner of the Leo Tolstoy Award in the nomination "21st Century". In 2008 he compiled the collection of stories "The War" by a wide range of authors - from classics Leo Tolstoy and Arthur Conan-Doyle to contemporaries Evgeny Nosov and Alexander Prokhanov. The same year he published his own collected stories “Boots full of hot vodka” and a collection of essays “I Came from Russia” with his reedited texts written in the 2000s.