http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrey_Kurkov
He started writing at the age of seven when after the death of two of his three pet hamsters, he wrote a poem about the loneliness of the remaining pet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_and_the_Penguin
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/bwriting/stories/s1461208.htm
Andrey Kurkov: Well, it is absurd, and in the Soviet time it was much more absurd. I started writing when I was seven years old. I started writing poetry. My father was a military test pilot so he was almost never at home. I had cactuses—1500 cactuses—and I had three hamsters, and actually two of the hamsters died accidentally because I let them run in a small two-room flat (not a one-room flat)…
Ramona Koval: They got lost?
Andrey Kurkov: No, one was actually crushed to death by the door accidentally by my father, and the other one was eaten by the stray cat that I brought from the street to feed, but I wanted to give some sausage to the cat. The cat has seen the hamster and the hamster was gone, and I had one last hamster still alive, so I wrote a piece of poetry about the solitude of a hamster who has lost his friends. Two or three days later he fell down off the balcony from the fifth floor, so I don’t know whether it was a suicide or it was an accident, but it is a real story. It sounds absurd, yes? And the second piece of poetry I wrote the day after the third hamster’s death, it was about Lenin because I knew already that he was also dead. I didn’t know how he died, but I went to a Soviet kindergarten where we had lots of ideology so I knew that Lenin loved children, animals and hard work. I like these characteristics, so I decided to start writing, and I wrote a lot of this ideologically sound stuff as a child.
Ramona Koval: Fifteen-hundred cacti? That’s hard to believe.
Andrey Kurkov: You see, it was a so-called Khrushchev flat on the fifth floor, so we had three windows and a balcony. I remember I bought these tin shelves for the kitchen, and I attached them to the inside of every window, and the cactuses were in plastic cubes which were sold in toy shops, with one side cut off, and they were small. There is still about 200 alive in my parents flat after all this time.