Yeremei Aipin, the son of a hunter and fisherman, was born in the village of Varyogan in West Siberia in 1948. Ethnically, he is of the Khanty people. As a young man he worked in the Siberian oil fields, then as a carpenter, before turning to creative writing at the Literary University in Moscow. Subsequently, he spent a decade at the Center for the Native Arts in Khanty-Mansiisk, where he later established the Native Heritage Park, a museum and sacred-place memorial known as Torurn Maa. Much of Aipin's career has been devoted to politics, working on behalf of the Khanty people as a member of the Duma, the parliament of the Russian State. He is the editor of a monthly newspaper, The Word of the Peoples of the North. His writing has been translated into German, Finnish, Hungarian, English, and several languages spoken by Muslims around the world.