Pavel Krusanov is a modern Russian prose writer. He is a brother of the Russian avant-garde historian Andrey Krusanov.

Pavel Vasilyevich Krusanov was born into the family of clerks in Leningrad on August 14, 1961. The boy spent part of his childhood in Egypt, where his father worked at construction of the Aswan Dam. Pavel graduated from the Herzen Teachers' Training College majoring in geography and biology.

In the first half of the 1980s Pavel Krusanov was a vivid figure of underground Russian music, a member of the Leningrad rock club and the Abzats band. In the same period he participated in undergrund publishing of a non-conformist magazine.

The would-be writer tried his wings as a lighting technician in the theater, a gardener, a sound recording technician, an advertizing engineer, and a press operator. From 1989 he worked as an editor in publishing houses and had his first writings published in official editions.

The year 1990 saw the publication of his first book, Where the Wreath is not to be Laid. It was followed with Alone I Dance in 1992. In the beginning Pavel Krusanov's writing was under a great influence of William Faulkner.
Afterwards his creative manner underwent drastic changes: first towards sophisticated post-modernist constructs (Distinctions, 1995), and then approaching alternative realism and "the imperial novel".

Upon profound studies of the Karelian-Finnish epos in 1996 — 1997 Pavel Krusanov put Kalevala runes collected by Elías Lyonnrot into an epic novel under the same name. Kalevala, which still remains the fullest version of these runes, was republished in 2004.  

Pavel Krusanov gained all-Russian fame with his novel The Bite of an Angel, an alternative history novel about a man's rise to the Russian imperial power. The novel's genre was defined both as intellectual fantasy and anti-Utopia, as alternative history and neomythologism. Despite loud disputes of literary critics, The Bite of an Angel won the National Best-Seller Award of 2003.

The American Hole (2005) foretold the future of 2010 — 2011. One of the novel's main characters is the cult avant-garde musician Sergey Kuryokhin, who assertedly did not die in 1996, but just decided to start a new life from scratch.

Pavel Krusanov is the winner of the literary awards Severnaya Palmira (1996), ABC-award (2001), and The National Best-Seller (2003). The writer is married and has two sons. He is fond of collecting coleopterans.