Victoria Borisova-Ollas has become one of the most visible and most-honored composers in contemporary Sweden. She writes orchestral works that define large, distinctive acoustic space and are popular both among contemporary music enthusiasts and general listeners. Borisova-Ollas was born on December 21, 1969, in Vladivostok in the Russian Far East, then part of the Soviet Union. She began studying music as a child and was sent to the Central School of Music in Moscow, more than 5,000 miles away. From there, she went on for composition studies at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory. In 1992, she moved to Sweden, studying at the Malmö Academy of Music and the Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm. She also took courses at the Royal Academy of Music in London, which she attended on a scholarship, and it was in Britain that she first made a splash: her 1997 orchestral composition Wings of the Wind won the Masterprize Competition in the UK the following year. That was the first in a series of prizes for Borisova-Ollas, mostly in Sweden, that culminated with induction into the Royal Swedish Academy of Music in 2008. Her clarinet concerto Golden Dances of the Pharaohs won awards in two consecutive years, taking the Swedish Music Publishers Association's annual award in 2010 and the Christ Johnson Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music in 2011. Borisova-Ollas has composed two symphonies, a variety of programmatic orchestral works, piano and chamber works, and two operas, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (2007), based on a novel by Salman Rushdie, and Dracula (2017). Her music has been performed by orchestras in many countries, including the London Symphony Orchestra, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, and the NHK Symphony Orchestra in Japan. More than ten of Borisova-Ollas' compositions have been recorded on such labels as EMI, Metronome, and Musica Rediviva. In 2020, the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra released Angelus, a collection of Borisova-Ollas' orchestral compositions, on the BIS label. ~ James Manheim