A night of cutting-edge Russian contemporary literature, with the authors, translators and editors of a new issue of Words Without Borders.
Flash fiction, protest poetry, novellas reflecting the diaspora experience – current literature in Russian is vibrant and diverse across many genres. A team of translators has rendered the work of young Russian-language authors with roots across Eurasia into English for the February issue of leading translation journal Words without Borders.
Join the editors, translators and authors for an online roundtable on subjects such as the Russian literary scene in Western European cities, anti-war poetry by women and translating web-based literature, followed by a bilingual reading.
Featuring: Anne O. Fisher, Alex Karsavin, Ilya Danishevsky, Dinara Rasuleva, Katherine E. Young, Fiona Bell, Elina Alter, Alla Gorbunova, Ksenia Zheludova, Olga Breininger, Helena Kernan, and Hilah Kohen and Josephine von Zitzewitz (editors), Susan Harris (Words Without Borders Editorial Director).
Header image: Aureliya Akmullayeva, from the triptych Daydreams. Courtesy of the artist.
Anne O. Fisher teaches Translation and Interpreting and is the vice president of ALTA. Her translations include work by Ilya Danishevsky and Dmitry Kuzmin in Life Stories, Death Sentences: Contemporary Russian-Language LGBTQ+ Writing.
Alex Karsavin is a translator and writer based in Chicago & New York. They are the translations & poetry editor at Homintern magazine and co-translating Ilya Danishevsky’s novel Manneling in Chains together with Anne O. Fisher.
Ilya Danishevsky is one of the best-known literary editors in Russia. Danishevsky produces regular literary features for the online edition of the journal Snob, and was the curator of the literary programme at Moscow’s Voznesensky Center.
Dinara Rasuleva hails from Kazan and is now an active member of the Russian-speaking émigré community in Berlin, where she is a two-time Russian slam poetry champion. Her poetry is widely published. She writes in Tatar, Russian, and English.
Katherine E. Young is a poet and translator, the author of Woman Drinking Absinthe and Day of the Border Guards, and the translator of Anna Starobinets, Azerbaijani political prisoner Akram Aylisli, and Inna Kabysh.
Fiona Bell is a scholar and translator of Russophone literature. Her translation of Stories of a Life by Natalia Meshchaninova received a 2020 PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant.
Olga Breininger is a prose writer, cultural scholar, and literary critic. Her debut There Was No Adderall in the Soviet Union, was nominated for all four of Russia’s major annual prizes for literary prose.
Elina Alter is a writer and translator living in New York. Her recent translations from Russian have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Modern Poetry in Translation, the New England Review, The Paris Review Daily, and the Nashville Review.
Alla Gorbunova is a poet, prose writer, translator, and critic. She has published five books of poetry and received the Andrei Bely Prize for her 2019 collection Inside Starfall.
Ksenia Zheludova is a poet and producer. She maintains a dedicated feed on VKontakte to promote her work. Her poetry collections, Slovno and Navernost’ have appeared in print and online.
Helena Kernan is a translator and scholar. Her translations have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation. In 2020, she was the inaugural Translator in Residence at Pushkin House together with Galina Rymbu.
Hilah Kohen is a translator and scholar. Her work can be found in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Nashville Review, Music & Literature, and elsewhere. She was formerly the news editor of Meduza in English (meduza.io/en).
Josephine von Zitzewitz is a scholar of Russian literature and translator. She is presently Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow at UIT The Arctic University of Norway, where she studies the phenomenon of contemporary Russian poetry on the internet.
Susan Harris is the editorial director of Words Without Borders and the coeditor, with Ilya Kaminsky, of The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry.