Polina Dashkova (born 14 July 1960) is a successful Russian crime novelist.^[1]

Dashkova was born in Moscow in 1960. She was educated at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute and then she worked as a journalist and as a translator from English. Her first novel was published in 1996. Since then she has published a series of books which are based upon the recent time of changes in Russia.^[2] She has sold over 40 million books.^[1]

She has sold 300,000 books in Germany^[1] and she won the Krimipreis crime award from Radio Bremen in 2006.^[2] At least a dozen of her books have been translated into German.^[3] A few of her books have been translated into Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Polish, Spanish.^[4]

In 2018 she was identified as one of the most popular women crime writers in Russia together with Darya Dontsova, Alexandra Marinina and Tatyana Ustinova beating many other living writers.^[5]