Olga solongo

I am a trilingual writer, educator and researcher. Born and raised in Eastern Siberia as a part of the last Soviet generation, I live in the south of France and consider myself a citizen of the world. I thrive in creative multicultural environments and write prose at the junction of deeply personal and boldly political. Holding Master's degrees in Linguistics and Education as well as in Journalism, and a PhD in Psychology, I design and teach courses and workshops in humanities, social sciences, and soft skills. Please check out my work.

Fiction
Non-fiction
TEACHING
research
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contact

FICTION

My published fiction is in my mother tongue, Russian. Solongo is my found pen name, it means "rainbow" in Mongolian: my home region is Buryatia which borders on Mongolia. I've been writing since childhood and have always dreamt of becoming a writer, like my grandma Olga Serova.

Tram to the Sea. A Wartime Elegy is my debut novel. It is set in a city in the south of France - the slightly phantasmagorical place which becomes a full character in this story. The city is home to a Russian emigrant Elena who left Russia for France already many years ago, and her family. Yet since February, 2022, her life is split, as if she were living simultaneously in two different realms: a carefree atmosphere of a seaside place and a terrible shock and frustration about the outbreak of war in Ukraine. When Elena meets a young American with a strange name, Flood, their relationship helps her deal with
despair. But where will it lead her and will her life remain the same?

The novel was published in 2025 by Sandermoen Publishing based in Switzerland whose slogan is "books impossible in Russia".

My short stories are published in several collections, including that of London Group of Multilingual Writers. Above are some of the books that house my stories Chez Alma, The Circles of Love, A Beautiful Accent, and The Charms of Chirali. Scenes from a Turkish Beach in the Second Summer of War.

non-fiction

I have contributed to several non-fiction books published in different languages. Here are the most prominent of them.

Ces Russes qui s'opposent à la guerre (The Russians who are Against the War) came out in French in Paris in 2024. The book paints portraits of 15 antiwar activists, of which I have authored two: of women-founders of Free Russia Foundation and Free Buryatia Foundation.

Hitler's Slaves, published both in English and German, is an impressively thick volume of oral history. About 600 former forced labourers for the Nazi regime living in 27 countries were interviewed for this project. My colleagues and I did our research for the book in the Russian region of Pskov.

This book in the Ukrainian language is devoted to Central- and Eastern-European women's experiences in WWII. What does a woman live through in times of extreme violence? Together with my colleagues from the Institute of Sociology, Russian Academy of Sciences, I speak here about women's memories of war.

Teaching

I specialise in engaging, interactive, hands-on teaching methods that stem from Socio-Cultural Theory of Lev Vygotsky in psychology and the Communicative Approach in pedagogy. My methods and tools stimulate creative and critical thinking and can be applied both to higher education and to corporate workshops and seminars. Feel free to contact me if you'd like to organise training for your company.

Over the past decade, I have gained a solid and versatile experience developing and teaching a course on Creativity at Montpellier Business School, both in English and French, to French and international groups of students at various study levels. More recently, I've been also teaching Design Thinking and Human-Centered Design.

I've also got about seven years-long experience of teaching students from some best
American colleges and universities coming to France from all over the US through the University of Minnesota study abroad program.
I have designed and taught classes in Child- and Adolescent Psychology, Language Development from a Cross-Cultural Perspective, Resilience in Children and Youth, and Cross-Cultural Psychology.

research

Since 2009, I've been working as an independent researcher. I am particularly interested in the diversity of Siberian people's identities: ethnic, religious, and professional, as well as their family history and the ways that family memories are kept and the collective memory is (re)constructed. The first results of my oral history project Sweet Home Siberia are presented in this book. With this project, I joined a core network of young researchers on Siberia, and in 2018 took part in its summer school on the island of Olkhon, Lake Baïkal.

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