Natalya Nikitichna Tolstaya was born on 2 May 1943 in Leningrad and died in 2010.
She was a granddaughter of Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy. Graduated from Leningrad University, she became Associate Professor at the Department of Scandinavian Philology, St. Petersburg University, where she taught Swedish. Natalya Tolstaya was known in scientific circles primarily as a strong Scandinavian philologist, with a focus on Swedish language and Russian-Swedish cultural relations. She even taught Russian in Sweden, and in her spare time began to write stories.
Together with her sister Tatyana Tolstaya she is the author of a collection of short stories "Sisters" and was regularly published in the literary journal Zvezda. Natalya Tolstaya's first literary experiments were in Swedish. Her prose is highly regarded by critics, as are her literary translations - for example, the collection of translations of poetry by the Finland-Swedish poet Edith Södergran "Страна, которой нет" (Landet som icke är / The Land That Is Not).
Among her literary awards is the Sergey Dovlatov prize.