Russell Working is a reporter and fiction writer whose short stories have appeared in publications ranging from The Atlantic Monthly to Zoetrope: All-Story.

A staff writer at the Chicago Tribune since 2003, he previously spent more than six years as a freelance reporter based in Vladivostok, Russia, and then in Cyprus. There he wrote for dozens of newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times , Business Week and Hong Kong's South China Morning Post. Traveling widely, he covered topics such as illegal gun production in the Philippines, Jordanian Chechens' support for the rebellion in Russia, and government assaults on the press in the Russian Far East.

Russell has also has worked as a reporter at newspapers in Oregon and Washington . He has taught fiction writing at the Gotham Writers Workshop.

His reporting has often found its way into his fiction. During a 2000 visit to China, Russell interviewed a North Korean refugee who had fled to China and was sold as a wife to a peasant. This later became the basis for his story, "Dear Leader." Likewise, his experiences covering police news at a rural Oregon daily led him to write "Perjury."

Russell won the Iowa Short Fiction Award for his 1987 collection, Resurrectionists. Publisher's Weekly said his style was "reminiscent of the early Paul Bowles, with the same muscular use of language, the same ability to create a mood fraught with tension." The New York Times said "he has an amazing ability to draw the reader immediately into the world about which he is writing, whether it is the paper mills of the Pacific Northwest, where a former policeman is almost courting death, the Haiti of voodoo and the dread Tonton Macoutes, or the lazy hot summer afternoons of a group of young boys."

His latest book of short stories, The Irish Martyr, was recently released by the University of Notre Dame Press in February. Douglas Glover called it "a powerful, brave and dangerous book that takes us to the borderlands where religion and geopolitics rip apart the lives of ordinary people."

He was born in Long Beach, California in 1959, and received his bachelor's degree in English from Whitworth College in Spokane, Washington He and his wife, Nonna, a Russian journalist, have two sons, Sergei and Lev