Leonid Yuzefovich is a Russian writer known for crime fiction stories set in the Russian Empire just before the Revolution. A candidate of historical sciences since 1981, he is fond of teaching history at school and authors non-fiction history books.  

Leonid Yuzefovich was born on December 18, 1947 in Moscow, but spent his childhood and youth in Perm. After graduation from the Perm University in 1970 he served the army in in Transbaikalia from 1970 to 1972. This is when he got deeply interested in Buddhism, Mongolia, and studied the biography of Baron Ungern, which resulted in writing his first historical novel, namely The Sovereign of the Desert (published in 1993) about Roman Ungern von Sternberg. The non-fiction book and its main character had a great influence on Victor Pelevin's popular novel Chapayev and Void (1996).

From 1975 to 2004 Leonid Yuzefovich worked as a history teacher at various schools. In 1984 he left Perm for Moscow. Presently Leonid Yuzefovich lives now in St. Petersburg and then in Moscow.
The writer made his literary debut with the story Engagement to Liberty published in the magazine Ural in 1977. However, his further writing career was quite rough.

Leonid Yuzefovich gained popularity only in 2001 after the publication of his series of historical detective stories about the detective Ivan Putilin. The book series got accolades of critics, who nevertheless  inevitably compared it to books by Boris Akunin. The author of books Engagement to Liberty (1980), Teaching Hour (1984), Espero Club (1987), As Conventionally Accepted by Ambassadors... (1988), The Sovereign of the Desert (1993), and others. His novel Prine of the Wind (2001) won the National Best-Seller Award 2001. The novel Cranes and Dwarfs gained Leonid Yuzefovich the first Big Book Award of 2009.
Books by Leonid Yuzefovich have beem translated into the German, Italian, French, Polish, and Spanish languages.

The writer's daughter is the literary critic Galina Yuzefovich and his son is the musician Mikhail Vinogradov.