SERGEI KALEDIN was born in Moscow in 1949. He spent his years of compulsory military service in one of the infamous construction battalions - to all intents and purposes a forced labour corps - building roads and felling trees in Siberia, and subsequently worked as a designer, a night watchman and a gravedigger. He began writing while studying at the Gorky Literary Institute, from which he graduated in 1979. For ten years his stories were regularly praised by Moscow's main literary journals and as consistently rejected. However, in 1987, as a result of glasnost, The Corridor, a collection of five stories, was published in Moscow. Only later - and not without a struggle - did two stories, "The Humble Cemetery" (now a successful stage play and film) and the more recent "The Construction Battalion", appear in the prestigious journal Novyi Mir. Almost over night Kaledin became one of the best-known younger writers in the Soviet Union, and his stories are now being translated into all the major European languages.