Vladimir Kozlov was born in 1972 in Mogilev, an industrial city in the eastern part of what was then the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. He spent his childhood and adolescence years on the suburbs of that city, witnessing the collapse of the Soviet empire and the advent of capitalism in its "wild" form, typical of most post-Soviet states.
Kozlov has worked as a journalist, newspaper editor, translator and documentary filmmaker. He is the author of a dozen books of prose and non-fiction, including "Gopniki" ("Hoods") (2002, "the year's best prose book", according to the review "Ex Libris"), "SSSR" ("USSR") (2009, long-listed for the national award "Bolshaya Kniga") and "Domoy" ("The Return") (2010, short-listed for the award "Nonkonformism" and long-listed for the award "Natsbest").
Kozlov has also co-written the script of the feature film "Igry motylkov" ("Butterfly Games").
The French translation of "Gopniki" came out in 2010 and that of "Domoy" in early 2012. Kozlov's short stories have been published in English in US literary journals and in the anthology "Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia" (2009). The novel "SSSR" is currently being translated into English.
In 2011, Kozlov was nominated by the Russian edition of the international magazine GQ for the Men of the Year award in the Author of the Year category. His short story "Mandariny" ("Tangerines") has been long-listed for the 2012 Kazakov award for the year's best short story.
Since the early 2000s, Kozlov has lived in Moscow.