Does anyone recommend any Siberian authors or novels?

Other than exile and prison-based novels and narratives, who writes of Siberia? Or is Siberian, particularly of native stock.

Dersu Uzala by Vladimir Arsenyev comes to mind - it's the book on which Akira Kurosawa's famous film was based. But Arsenyev is (I believe) an ethnic Russian. I'd also be very interested to hear of books by Siberian writers.

A famous narrative of exile and travel in Siberia, from the 17th Century, is "Life of the Archpriest Avvakum, by Himself", by Avvakum Petrovich - the author is an Old Believer priest who's exiled for heresy. I've only ever read extracts of this - some are available online at http://www.swentelomania.be/avvakum/

I just saw the movie, Derzu, last month, and loved it. I'm hoping to find contemporary authors, however.

There's some listed here although it seems limited to the Soviet period.

There is also an interesting article here. Page 2 has a bit about "modern" Siberian writers.

Varlam Shalamov esp Kolyma Tales

Valentin Rasputin (think his name's Valentin) Siberia, Siberia and others

and

Vassily Shukshin

all come to mind!

Assuming you mean people who write about Siberia or their experiences therein, I recommend Evgeniia Ginzburg, Journey into the Whirlwind. It's a very compelling story of her years as an inmate of the Gulag.

I'll second Siberia, Siberia. :)

A Dream In Polar Fog is a novel by an author from the indigenous Chukchi people; I haven't read it though.

>8 rarm: I'm thrilled - I've just requested A Dream in Polar Fog from the library. Thank you for the suggestion.

So glad to have been of assistance :)

#s8-10: I have just started reading A Dream in Polar Fog, and I'm enjoying it very much so far. Thank you!

Victor Astafyev Czar Fish, The Sad Detective, born in Krasnoyarsk, is probably the most Siberian of Russian writers. His war novels are like nothing else.

Vyacheslav Shishkov Gloomy River - Ugryum-Reka is an epic novel about Siberia at the turn of the last century. It was serialized on Soviet TV in the 60s.

Chinghiz Aytmatov, Spotted Dog Running at the Edge of the Sea is about Siberia (the Far East), the author is Kirghiz.

Among the native Siberians Yuri Rytkheu, a Chukchi, and Grigori Khodzher, a Nanai, are well known.

Here's a peak at Siberian life during the 1770's through the eyes of the French astronomer Chappe d'Auteroche.

http://www.archive.org/details/ajourneyintosib00conggoog

I've been waiting for Kessinger, or Bibliobazaar, or whoever to put up a reprint on Amazon. There is an OCR version, but I fear the long 's' would be too much for the machine; besides OCR's chap my hide.

Aleksandr Cherkasov's Notes of an East Siberian Hunter (1868) has been called “a complete encyclopedia of Siberian hunting,” if books about hunting attract you; in Leskov's On the Edge of the World (1875-76) a priest in Siberia discovers his heathen guide “has more truly Christian impulses” than many Christians; Dmitry Mamin-Sibiryak's The Privalov Fortune (1883) is about the insatiable greed of financial schemers in Siberia; Vsevolod Ivanov's Armored Train 14-69 (1922; in LT as Pantsertrein 1469 en Partijgenooten) is about about partisan activity in Siberia during the Civil War, and in his The Adventures of a Fakir (1935, also tr. I Live a Queer Life: An Extraordinary Autobiography) a boy crisscrosses prerevolutionary Siberia looking for work and adventure; Alexander Afinogenov's play A Distant Point (1935, also tr. Far Taiga) is about 24 hours at Dalyokoe, a small Siberian railway station; Aleksei Yugov's Immortality (1944) is about class struggle among Siberian gold prospectors in early Soviet times; Pavel Nilin's Cruelty (1956, also tr. Comrade Venka; in LT as Crudeltà) is about an idealistic detective in Siberia; in Rasputin's Money for Maria (1967) Maria, the manager of a Siberian village store, is wrongly accused of embezzlement, and his Live and Remember (1974) is about a WWII deserter and his wife in 1945 Siberia; Georgi Markov's Siberia (1971-73; in LT as Sibir') is an epic novel that brings together the period of Bolshevik political activity and that in which the exiled Decembrists were active; and in Sergei Zalygin's The Commission (1975) a Siberian village just after the Revolution sets up a forest commission that is crushed by the growing Soviet power (it's been called an “encyclopedia of Russian peasant life”). There are lots more that haven't been translated!

My post on A Dream in Polar Fog:

https://languagehat.com/rytkheus-fog-dream/