You must register by 4pm on November 15, 2024 to attend this event.

Please join the Harriman Institute for a poetry reading by Maria Stepanova, who will be joined by her translators Sasha Dugdale, and Eugene Ostashevsky.

Maria Stepanova has long played a central role in post-Soviet culture as leading poet of her generation, essayist and editor-in-chief of Colta.ru, the enormously influential online publication. The prestigious Andrei Bely Prize and Joseph Brodsky Fellowship are among her many awards. Her novel In Memory of Memory solidified her reputation with the Big Book Prize and the NOS Literary Prize, not to mention the dozens of translations and reviews that have appeared in the international press. The English translation by Sasha Dugdale (New Directions, 2021) was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. You can read an excerpt from the work in the Summer 2021 issue of Harriman Magazine.

Sasha Dugdale is a poet and translator. Her sixth book of poetry is “The Strongbox,” published by Carcanet (UK) in 2024. “Deformations” (2020) was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot and Derek Walcott Prizes. Her long poem “Joy” won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem of 2016. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Dugdale’s translation of Maria Stepanova’s prose work In Memory of Memory was shortlisted for the International Booker and won the MLA Lois Roth Award. She has translated two of Stepanova’s poetry collections and work by a number of Russian-language women poets, including Elena Shvarts and Marina Tsvetaeva. For many years she specialized in translating Russian-language new writing for theatres in the UK and US, including the New York Public Theater and the UK’s Royal Court Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company.

Eugene Ostashevsky is a poet and translator. He was born in Leningrad, grew up in New York, and currently lives in New York and Berlin. His poetry collections, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi and Feeling Sonnets, are published in the NYRB Poets series. He selected and translated the poems in Alexander Vvedensky’s An Invitation for Me to Think, also in the NYRB Poets series, and translated The Fire Horse: Children’s Poems by Mayakovsky, Mandelstam, and Kharms, published in the NYRB Kids series.