Polina Dashkova is well-known as the author of “intellectual detective”, free from unwanted gore and sheer glamour: it is high-quality mass literature telling about life in modern Russia. Her books have been translated into the German and French languages since the early 2000s. Polina Dashkova is the most popular contemporary Russian writer in Germany.

Polina Dashkova is the penname of Tatyana Polyachenko, who was born on 14 July 1960.

In 1979 she entered the Mikhail Gorky Literary Institute. As a senior student yet she got employed as a literary consultant in the Rural Youth magazine. In the 1990s she was a manager of the literature department of The Russian Courier.

Polina Dashkova made her writing debut with poetry and had her verses published in the magazines Rural Youth, The Youth, Sources, and the Young Voices almanac.

However, the writer became famous as the author of detective stories. Her first book Blood of the Unborn (1996) gained her wide popularity. In 2006 Polina Dashkova won the Bremen Radio Award for detective and action prose writers.

Her literary pseudonym comes from the name of her younger daughter Dasha (Dashkova) and derivative of her surname (Polina). She is married and has two daughters, Anna and Darya.