Michael Idov

Michael Idov is a novelist, director, and screenwriter. A Latvian-born American raised in Riga under Soviet occupation, he moved to New York after graduating from the University of Michigan.

Idov’s writing career began at New York Magazine, where his features won three National Magazine Awards. His first book, 2009’s satirical novel Ground Up, sold over 100,000 copies worldwide and was optioned for a series by HBO. From 2012 to 2014, he was the editor-in-chief of GQ Russia, an experience that became the basis for his 2018 memoir Dressed Up for a Riot.

In addition to spy novels The Collaborators (2024) and The Cormorant Hunt (2026), Idov has worked on numerous film and TV projects, including Londongrad, Deutschland 83, Cannes Main Competition title Leto, and his own 2019 directing debut The Humorist. He and his wife and screenwriting partner, Lily, divide their time between Los Angeles, Berlin, and Portugal.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

None. I should be completely honest about this. The editing notes I receive on the Cormorant Trilogy are mercifully light; in return, I pretty much let the publisher title the books for me. It's probably wise, too, because I'm terrible at it. I had originally designed a whole convention where all three titles would be these ambiguously German/Russian K-words. The first novel would be called Kosmopolit, the second Konservator, etc. Then I was gently reminded that the people buying the book at a store should, as a rule, be able to pronounce its title.

That said, I did mount a brief campaign to call this one Gray Actors: a political term for people or institutions with unclear or complicated intentions, which describes its plot pretty well. But The Cormorant Hunt is snappier, and retains some of the same ambiguity because it's the character named Cormorant who's doing the hunting.

What's in a name?

Glad you asked. I am obsessed with character names and the information they communicate to the astute reader: age, class, education level. I have once written a whole essay in the New York Times about how difficult and important it is to nail the names outside of your own culture. (In The Cormorant Hunt, there is a German politician named Florian Reschke; when I asked on Threads whether this sounds okay, the post unexpectedly went viral, because Germans are rightfully sick of every Anglophone writer giving their compatriots names like Hans Schultz and Dieter Schmidt).

Ironically, it took me seconds to land on "Ari Falk" for my main character. I remember I wanted his name to be short, to honor the Jason Bourne / Jack Ryan tradition, but clearly Jewish, to subvert it a bit. And it was literally the first thing that came to mind. Since he's more of an investigator than an action guy, I like that "Falk" might bring to mind Columbo, but I wasn't conscious of it at the time.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

Extremely, because my teenage self was an insufferable snob. It took me decades of experience to realize that "genre" — be it horror, sci-fi, or the spy thriller — is a concrete foundation upon which you can build anything you want. All it does is ensure that the building won't collapse under a light breeze. That's why The Cormorant Hunt, a "genre" book, contains much more of my actual worldview, my personal concerns and terrors, than the stuff I was writing when I was trying to be the next Nabokov.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I always know the ending going in. The beginnings are harder. To be frank, I got a little too much praise for the opening scene of my previous book, which was basically a recreation of the so-called "RyanAir incident" from 2021: a flight from Athens to Vilnius was forced down in Belarusian airspace, just so the authorities could grab a dissident blogger who was on board. You can't lose with an opening gambit like that, but it's hard to take full credit for it. So, for this one, I felt some pressure to outdo myself. The prologue I ended up with is based on a similarly real but unpublicized story, of a friend fleeing Russia on foot in 2022. I don't know if it's as exciting as looking out a plane's window and seeing a MIG hovering nearby, but I'm proud of its authenticity and how it turned out.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

I am not exactly miles removed from Falk, a Slavic lit major who ended up in intelligence to pay off his college-loan obligations. He even has my tennis injury (a repaired Achilles' tendon). In The Cormorant Hunt, however, I tried something else: I gave my own biography to the book's antagonist, men's-rights guru Felix Burnham. It was interesting to see if my immigration experience, and years of relative loneliness that followed, could fuel a villain's origin story. So it's the bad guy who's me, in a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I sense.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Almost all of the inspirations behind the Cormorant books come from the real world. The Collaborators was written at the onset of the war in Ukraine, when the biggest question in the world seemed to be "what made Russia turn fascist, and is the U.S. partly culpable?" Under all the action, the book was essentially my attempt to answer that.

Similarly, The Cormorant Hunt is set in 2024, just before Trump 2.0. Its main inspiration comes from observing the distinctly male rage against the post-WWII world order: what drives it, who is stoking it, why? I had to research "men's rights" ideologues of every stripe, neo-Nazis, the Reichsbürger, green extremists, and last but not least the role Russian money plays in empowering all these groups. As a process, it was not fun — but I hope the result is.

Visit Michael Idov's website.

Writers Read: Michael Idov (October 2009).

--Marshal Zeringue