Kseniya Melnik's debut book is the linked story collection Snow in May, which was short-listed for the International Dylan Thomas Prize and long-listed for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. It was published in the US and UK in 2014 and will come out in Japan in translation in 2017. Born in Magadan, Russia, Kseniya moved to Alaska in 1998, at the age of 15. She received her MFA from New York University. Her work has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Epoch, Esquire (Russia), Granta (Finland), O, Oprah Magazine, Tin House,Virginia Quarterly Review, Prospect (UK), and was selected for Granta's New Voices series. She was a fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in 2014 and at Hawthornden Castle in Scotland in 2016, and served as the 2015-2016 Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Washington at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C.. She currently lives in Los Angeles.