Tatyana Nikitichna Tolstaya was born into the large family of Professor of Physics, the son of the famous Russian writer Alexey Tolstoy in Leningrad.

She graduated from the Classical Philology Faculty of the Leningrad University. Having married a Muscovite, she moved to Moscow and worked as a proofreader there. Tatyana Tolstaya's first short story On a Gold Porch There Were Sitting... was published in the Avrora magazine in 1983. It was followed with publication of 19 short stories and the novella Plot in various years. Thirteen of them made the collection of stories On a Gold Porch There Were Sitting (Fakir, Circle, Loss, Lovely Shura, River Okkervil, and others). The Sleep-Walker in Fog saw the light in 1988.

Thanks to her special manner of writing with subtle tints of neomythologism, fantasy and unique contrast techniques Tatyana Tolstaya is known as a most popular author of twenty four short stories.

From 1990 the writer was a literature professor in Skidmor College in the USA. A year later she resorted to journalism and had her first popular novel Kyss' published.

Tatyana Tolstaya is well-known as the author of contemporary literature with traits of modernism, postmodernism and realism. She belongs in the 'New Wave' literature and is one of the bright figures of the 'artistic prose', which is enrooted in the 'game prose' of Mikhail Bulgakov and celebrates parody and eccentricity of the author's Self.