Sergei Davydov will sign copies of his books and talk with readers at the Prague Book Tower stand on Friday. His books will be on sale at the stand during the signing.

In summer 2026, Freedom Letters published Davydov's new book Midwest. Midwest is neither a state nor a country. It is a state of mind: an endless in-between where you are forever an emigrant. Davydov writes about the four years since the start of the full-scale war the way he lived them, in a restless shift of genres, voices and moods. Free verse, prose, dreams, monologues, one euro in the bank and a long wait in line for a better life. The book ends not in victory but with the chance to go on living. Which, in the end, is the same thing.

Sergei Davydov is a Russian writer and playwright who works in prose, drama and poetry. His novel Springfield (2023) was the first book published by Freedom Letters, a Russian-language publishing house in exile, and was shortlisted for the Dar Literary Prize. The novel has been published or is forthcoming in English, German, French, Spanish, Danish and Japanese. Its English translation received a PEN Translates award from English PEN (UK) in 2026, and Nicolas Stuyckens's French translation is on the final shortlist for the Prix Pierre-François Caillé de la traduction.

Springfield has faced censorship by the Russian authorities: in 2024, Roskomnadzor, Russia's media regulator, placed the novel on its list of banned literature, and PEN America named it one of the main casualties of the crackdown on LGBTQ+ themes in Russian literature.

Davydov's books have been covered by Libération, El País, El Mundo, Literary Hub and other international outlets. He has taken part in the Berlin International Literature Festival and has read from his work at the Frankfurter Buchmesse. As a playwright, he won the Kulminatsiya Play of the Year award (2020) for Republic, and the expert council of the Golden Mask, Russia's national theatre award, named its stage production one of the key theatre events of the season.