Irena Maryniak is a specialist on religion and Eastern Europe and the author of Spirit of the Totem (1995), a survey of mythological and religious ideas in Soviet Russian fiction. She has worked for Cambridge University Press and lectured in Russian Literature at the Universities of London and Wales. Between 1996 and 2004, she was Eastern Europe Editor for Index on Censorship, based at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. She is currently a freelance writer and translator, living in London.