The museum is located in a wooden mansion from the 19th century, designed in the Art Nouveau style with Gothic elements. This house belonged to the merchant Frida Tsukerman and was considered one of the best in the city. In 1913, the building was reconstructed by provincial architect V. A. Sokolovsky. In 1894, the governor of the Yenisei province, L. K. Telyakovsky, lived here.

After the revolution, the Tsukerman family emigrated, and the building was nationalized. It housed one of the first communes in Krasnoyarsk, then a dormitory for pilots, and later became an ordinary residential building.

The idea of creating a literary museum emerged in 1946 after the opening of a branch of the Writers' Union in Krasnoyarsk. The concept of the museum was developed by philologist and writer A. Ya. Gurevich. At the initiative of the chairman of the Writers' Union N. S. Ustinovich, the collection of exhibits began in 1956. The museum itself was established thanks to V. P. Astafyev and opened on June 6, 1997, after a decade-long restoration of the building.

The museum is exclusively dedicated to Siberian writers and literature about Siberia. Its collection features unique visual and written sources, documents, photographs, posters, playbills, autographs of writers and poets from the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as rare books and magazines from that time.

The museum's library houses books and archives of Siberian writers such as V. P. Astafyev, S. V. Sartakov, I. D. Rozhdestvensky, N. S. Ustinovich, E. A. Akhadov, N. I. Mamin, P. P. Petrov, M. I. Ocharov, I. I. Panteleev, M. S. Perevozchikov, Z. Ya. Yakhin, A. T. Cherkasov, A. I. Chmykhalo, and others.

Every year, the museum organizes a scientific and practical conference for schoolchildren called "Siberia: Harsh and Tender."