Vladimir Kozlov was born in Mogilev, an industrial city in what was then the Belarussian Soviet Socialist Republic and is now the country of Belarus.
He spent his childhood and adolescence on the suburbs of that city, witnessing the collapse of the Soviet empire and a bizarre mix of unbridled freedom, wild capitalism and rampant crime in the early 1990s, before moving to Minsk and later to Moscow.
Kozlov has more than a dozen books of fiction and nonfiction to his name, including Gopniki (Hoods) (2002, "the year's best prose book", according to the Russian book review Ex Libris), SSSR (USSR) (2009, long-listed for the national award Bolshaya Kniga), Domoy (The Return) (2010, short-listed for the award Nonkonformism and long-listed for the award Natsbest), 1986 (2012, long-listed for Natsbest) and Lithium (2018).
Kozlov is the winner of the prestigious Made in Russia award in the category Literature (2013). He was also nominated for GQ Russia's Writer of the Year in 2011 and 2012.
Kozlov's novels and short stories have been published in translation in the United States, France, Serbia and Slovakia.
In recent years, he has written and directed independent films, including an adaptation of his novella Desyatka (Number Ten), which collected the Bronze Award at the debut film festival Spirit of Fire in Khanty-Mansiisk (Russia), Sledy na snegu (Traces in the Snow), a groundbreaking documentary about the influential Siberian punk rock movement of the 1980's, and Anomie, which won the jury's special mention at the Warsaw international film festival in 2016.
Kozlov's short story Drill and Song Day was published in the anthology Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia (Tin House, 2009) and the short story Politics was included in the anthology Best European Fiction 2014 (Dalkey Archive Press, 2014). His short fiction was published in English in the US in AGNI Magazine, Hayden's Ferry Review and 3:AM Magazine.
The English translation of SSSR was published in the US in 2014 by Fiction Advocate as USSR: Diary of a Perestroika Kid (translated by Andrea Gregovich).
In 2018, Fiction Advocate put out 1987 and Other Stories, a collection of Kozlov's short fiction, also translated by Gregovich.