Translation Residency

Positioned at the crossroads of culture, Pushkin House has always encouraged translation across national contexts, languages and borders and worked to inspire creatives on all sides to join global conversations. 

In 2019 we established the Translation Residency programme. The aim of the programme is to facilitate cultural exchange between the Russian-speaking and English-speaking creative communities and to create opportunities for the translation of contemporary literature from Russian into English.

The Translation Residency provides the catalyst for exploring what translation can mean in this context: translating words, languages, cultures, media, identities and ideas.

Pushkin House collaborates with an independent jury which includes poets, writers and translators who coordinate the selection process.

The first residency resulted in the publication of new translations by Helena Kernan of poems by Galina Rymbu in Modern Poetry in Translation.

In 2020–2021 the residency was disrupted by the global pandemic.

In 2022 the jury made a decision to support the work of Katherine E. Young. She is the award-winning translator of Look at Him by Anna Starobinets (Russia), Farewell, Aylis by Akram Aylisli (Azerbaijan), and Russophone poetry from Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. Young was named a 2015 Hawthornden Fellow (Scotland) and a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow (USA). 

Young is also a prolific poet herself. She is the author of the poetry collections Woman Drinking Absinthe and Day of the Border Guards (2014 Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize finalist). From 2016–2018, she served as the inaugural Poet Laureate for Arlington, Virginia, USA and edited Written in Arlington.