Yevgeny Prilepin was born 7 July 1975 in the village of Ilyinka, Ryazan Oblast, in the family of a teacher and a nurse. His family lived there until 1984, when they moved to Dzerzhinsk. He began his career at age 16 as a loader in a bread shop. He graduated from the Faculty of Philology of the Nizhny Novgorod State University and the School of Public Policy. He worked as a laborer, a security guard, and served as a squad leader in the Russian police group OMON, and subsequently took part in the fighting in Chechnya in 1996 and 1999.