Laurel E. Fay is a widely published writer on Russian and Soviet music, who has been traveling to and studying in Russia since 1971. She lives in Staten Island, New York.

She received her Ph.D. in musicology from Cornell University. A specialist in Russian and Soviet music, she has taught at the Ohio State University, Wellesley College and New York University and for the past eighteen years she has served as Consultant on Russian Music to the music publisher G. Schirmer, Inc. Her articles have appeared in the New York Times, Musical America and Opera News as well as in many scholarly publications, and she was a contributing editor of The New Grove Dictionary of Opera. The author of Shostakovich: A Life (2000) and editor of Shostakovich and His World (2004), Fay has received an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award and the Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society in recognition of her contributions to Shostakovich scholarship.