After Dinner Speakers: Vitali Vitaliev, John Weston, Peter Jay

Vitali Vitaliev was born in 1954 in Kharkov, Ukraine. He graduated from Kharkov University in French and English and worked as an interpreter and translator before becoming a journalist in 1981. A repressed Europhile dromomaniac with fluent English, he was working as a special correspondent for Krokodil magazine in Moscow when he appeared as Clive James' "Moscow Correspondent" on Saturday Night Clive. On 31 January 1990 he and his family 'defected', moving first to London, then taking up residence (and citizenship) in Australia. After a few years there he moved back to the UK - he currently lives in Edinburgh. His journalism work in the former Soviet Union included stories and essays for Ogonyok, Literaturnaya Gazeta and Nedelya as well as Krokodil, earning him the Golden Calf Literary Award, five annual Krokodil Awards, the Journalist of the Year Honorary Diploma for 1987 and the 1989 Ilf and Petrov Prize for Satirical Journalism. He has written for newspapers in Australia (e.g. The Age), as well as Punch, The Guardian, The Spectator, The European and The Daily Telegraph, for the latter contributing a regular column 'Vitali Vitaliev's America'. He has made several television documentaries for Channel 4, ABC and the BBC, including My Friend Little Ben (in BBC1's Byline series, 1990) and The Train To Freedom- a programme in the series Travels With My Camera (Channel 4, 1994). He has been a guest on Have I Got News for You for the BBC, and for almost 3 years appeared regularly on the sofa in Europe Direct, BBC World's magazine programme on weekday evenings. On Radio 4 he has been a regular roving reporter for Breakaway. As well as the books listed below he also wrote The Last Eighteen Drops for Granta magazine's Russia: The Wild East issue (no. 64) in 1998.