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 graduated from the Minsk State Linguistic University in 1997 and started working for Belarus’ only English language newspaper, Minsk News. A year later, he won a fellowship to attend a graduate school in the United States. He graduated from the Indiana University School of Journalism in 1999 and returned to Belarus to take the chief editor’s position at the same paper, which by then was renamed Belarus Today. In the summer of 2000, he moved to the Russian capital to work for another English language publication, The Russia Journal. He spent two years with the paper, after which went freelance.
Kozlov has been writing prose since 1998. His first collection of short stories, which also included the title novella "Gopninki (Hoodlums)," came out in 2002 in the Moscow based publisher "Ad Marginem" to critical acclaim. The domestic book review "Ex Libris" named "Gopniki" the year's best Russian prose book (tied with Leonid Kostyukov's "Velikaya strana.") "Gopniki" was followed up by the novels "Shkola (School)"(2003, publisher Ad Marginem), "Varshava (Warsaw)" (2004, publisher Ad Marginem), "Platskart (Second Class)" (2006, publisher Vagrius), "Pops" (2007, publisher Amphora), "SSSR (USSR)" (2009, publisher AST) and "Domoy (Back Home)" (2009, publisher Amphora). Kozlov is also the author of several non-fiction books.
In 2007, Kozlov won the contest "Tamizdat" organized by the Summer Literary Seminars program, in the prose category. The English translation of Kozlov's winning story, "Drill and Song Day," was subsequently published in the spring 2008 issue of the AGNI Review and in the collection Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia. The French translation of "Gopniki" is about to come out in early 2010.