Spotlight On Writers
Dmitry Berkut
- Where do you originate from?
I was born in the Soviet Union — at least that’s what my passport says. My parents lived in Veliky Novgorod, where my father was a photographer and artist and my mother worked in human resources. I think I inherited something from both: his creativity and her practicality. But to give birth to me, my mother chose to travel to Nikolsky, a small settlement in the Russian North surrounded by Karelian lakes and pine forests. My grandmother lived there and worked as a midwife at the local hospital. She is ninety-seven now, and it seems to me that the people she helped into the world would be enough to fill a city far larger than that settlement. In the years that followed, our family moved often, searching for a place to call home. Perhaps that is what shaped my restless, wandering nature. In any case, I have spent much of my adult life on the road.
- What do you cherish most about the place you call home?
The older I get, the less I think of home as a single place. I have lived in different countries and carry parts of each with me. Today, that place is Porto, a city in northern Portugal near the ocean, and I cherish the sense of stability it has given me: familiar streets, favorite cafés, neighbors I recognize, books waiting for me on the same shelf.
Perhaps that is why the search for home appears so often in my writing. My first novel, Clochard, was in many ways about finding it.
- What ignites your creativity?
I rarely find inspiration in grand events. More often, it begins with something small: a conversation, a fleeting gesture, a man counting coins in the middle of the street, an elderly woman eating ice cream, a girl watering flowers in the rain, an object that seems out of place, or a moment that lingers in my mind for reasons I cannot quite explain.
I spent many years working as a photojournalist, and I think that experience shaped the way I write. It taught me to look at the world closely and to treat details with respect. Often something important is hidden inside the most ordinary things. I am interested in people: their habits, quirks, small joys, and disappointments. Perhaps everyday life itself remains my greatest source of inspiration.
- Do you have a favorite word, and could you incorporate it into a poetic phrase?
I probably don’t have a single favorite word. But if I had to choose one, it would be story. We live among stories. For years I told them through a camera, and later through words. Over time, I have become convinced that stories are what help us understand one another and ourselves.
The world is made not of places, but of the stories people carry within them.
- What is your pet peeve?
If there is one thing that consistently irritates me, it is snobbery.
I have always found it strange when people are judged by their education, profession, background, cultural knowledge, or the size of their bank account. Life is far too complex to reduce a person to such categories.
Any attempt to divide the world into the important and the unimportant, the worthy and the unworthy, seems mistaken to me. Behind every person is an entire life that no label or social status can contain.
- How would you describe the essence of Dmitry Berkut?
I am not sure I can describe my own essence better than my writing does. The closest word would probably be curiosity. I have always wanted to understand what shapes a person, why we make the decisions we do, and how chance encounters, mistakes, and coincidences can alter the course of our lives.
Everything I do is, in one way or another, an attempt to understand the world a little better.
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