Valery Afanassiev is a Russian-French pianist and conductor, as well as a prose writer, poet, and essayist. He was born on 8 September 1947 in Moscow.
He studied at the Moscow Conservatory with Emil Gilels and Yakov Zak. In 1968 he won the International Johann Sebastian Bach Competition in Leipzig, and in 1972 he won the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels.
After the second of these victories, during a tour in Belgium, he decided not to return to the USSR. He later obtained Belgian citizenship. He currently lives in Versailles, France.
Afanassiev became widely known in the 1980s thanks to his musical partnership with Gidon Kremer. In his repertoire, a central place is occupied by works by Beethoven and Schubert, which he performs with extraordinary expressiveness.
He is also the author of eighteen novels, ten written in English and eight in French, published in France, Russia, and Germany. He has written fourteen cycles of poems in English and six poetic cycles in Russian, as well as a collection of commentaries on Dante's Divine Comedy, nine lectures on music in French, and several theatrical plays in which he appears at the same time as actor and pianist.