Victoria Borisova-Ollas was born in Russia in 1969 but has lived in Sweden since 1993. She first achieved international recognition when her work Wings of the Wind won second prize in the British Masterprize International Competition in 1998. She uses an original and innovative vocabulary of sounds to create acoustic spaces of great beauty and intensity, capable of captivating both sophisticated ears and those of less experienced but curious.
Borisova-Ollas began her musical studies at an early age. After graduating from the Moscow Central School of Music and the famous Tchaikovsky Conservatory, she continued her composition studies in Sweden at the Malmö Academy of Music and at the Royal College of Music in London.
Her music is performed worldwide by orchestras such as the London Symphony Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Münchner Philharmoniker, Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien, the Pittsburgh and Baltimore Symphony Orchestras, NHK Symphony Orchestra (Tokyo) and the Swedish and Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestras. Performances of her works have been broadcast by Swedish Television, BBC Radio 3, Swedish Radio P2 and by companies in Finland, Russia, the USA, Slovenia, Germany and Canada etc. In 2017, her opera Dracula had a successful première at the Royal Swedish Opera and enjoyed sold-out performances for two seasons.
Victoria Borisova-Ollas has received numerous prestigious awards, including the Christ Johnson Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Music (for the clarinet concerto Golden Dances of the Pharaohs), the Hilding Rosenberg Prize from the Swedish Society of Composers and the Swedish Music Publishers Association’s annual Music Publisher’s Award for the music drama The Ground Beneath Her Feet. In 2016 she was named Musician of the Year by the Swedish newspaper Expressen. Victoria Borisova-Ollas is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music.
