Nikolai Khalezin - about the author

Nikolaj Chalezin
(Николай Халезин; *1964, Minsk)
He is a playwright and journalist.
In the late 1980s and in the 1990s he had numerous cultural activities: he founded The Alternative Theatre in Minsk, he founded and directed the Vita Nova Gallery which later became the Modern Art Centre, and he was an editor of several important weeklies, which were shut down by the government for political reasons.
In March 2005, he and his wife Natalia Kaljadou founded The Free Theatre and he became its artistic director. The guarantor of the Theatre’s activities is sir Tom Stoppard, and Václav Havel used to be one, too. The Free Theatre is de facto banned in Belarus and it can only perform in private apartments, while it is successful in other countries, where it gets enthusiastic reviews and important international theatre prizes.
Chalezin authored ten plays. The Czech audience is familiar with one of them — the monodrama Generation Jeans. Another Chalezin’s play, Here I Am, was awarded as one of the five best plays (out of 557 texts) at the Berlin Theatre Festival. Actors from the Berlin Volksbühne participated in its staged reading. The latest play by Chalezin Under Control was shortlisted (together with 8 other texts) in the Global Playwright Contest.
Chalezin holds a number of prestigeous prizes for dramatists in various countries.
After the last presidential election, he and his wife were forced to leave the country, where he faced imprisonment for his artistic and publishing activities. He now lives in London.

source: http://www.divadlofeste.cz/en/authors/