Evgeny Zamiatin is best known for his anti-utopian science-fiction novel "We" (1920), which George Orwell acknowledged as an inspiration for his own "1984". This is the first full biography of Zamiatin in any language, encompassing his years in Russia as well as the time he spent in England during WWI supervising the construction of ice-breakers on the river Tyne, and also his life in the Paris emigration during the 1930s.