Maria Stepanova Readings
Maria Stepanova is one of Russia’s most innovative and exciting poets and thinkers. Her book-length poem Holy Winter 20/21 is published by Bloodaxe in the UK in March 2024, translated by poet and Russian specialist Sasha Dugdale. It is a Poetry Book Society Translation Choice.
Maria Stepanova was founding editor of Colta.ru, an independent cultural website which engaged with the cultural, social and political reality of contemporary Russia until the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, when all dissenting media in Russia were forced to shut down. As a prominent critic of Putin’s regime, Stepanova had to leave Russia and is now living in exile. Coltra.ru has been compared to Huffington Post in its status and importance.
Her prize-winning meta-memoir In Memory of Memory (Fitzcarraldo Editions) was published on 17 February 2021, followed by her first full English-language collection War of the Beasts and the Animals, a Poetry Book Society Translation Choice, on 25 March. Both books were translated by Sasha Dugdale, and were both shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2021. In Memory of Memory was shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize and longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2021. A third book by Stepanova, The Voice Over: Poems and Essays, edited by Irina Shevelenko, was published by Columbia University Press in the US in its Russian Library series in 2021.
Maria Stepanova launched War of the Beasts and the Animals at StAnza International Poetry Festival on 13 March and at a joint online event hosted by Bloodaxe Books on 23 March 2021. Watch the online launch below.
A profile of Maria Stepanova ran in The Guardian of 11 February 2021. Read the interview here.
A short extract from War of the Beasts and the Animals can be read in Modern Poetry in Translation here.
Links to interviews, poem features, reviews and major pieces on Maria Stepanova's poetry and prose are on Bloodaxe's news pages here.
'The moving, polyvocal latest from Stepanova (War of the Beasts and the Animals) is a book-length snowscape sequence that blends voices of fracture and love, evoking Ovid in exile and other historical touchstones, from Baron Munchausen to Hans Christian Andersen. Skillfully rendered by Dugdale, the air in these poems is infused with such dangers as “Airborne particles of frost ash/ Tiny cavalry officers” (noncoincidentally, the book was written during Covid-19 lockdowns). There is a feeling of arrest in these pages [...], but there’s equally a difficult hopefulness, the voices reaching for “that place where misfortune is not known,” however forlorn their searching. It adds up to a finely woven exercise in vocalization that always looks toward redemption, or at least respite, from its shocking precarity: “if time has a pocket then place me in it, gently.” A political undertow [...] adds to the collection’s depth. Bound together by a gently thoughtful steeliness, these poetic utterances are at once plaintive and resolute.' – Publishers Weekly, on Holy Winter
FORTHCOMING EVENTS
Thursday 2 May 2024, 7pm
Reading at Shakespeare & Co.
Shakespeare and Company, 37 rue de la Bûcherie, 75005 Paris, France
Maria Stepanova and her translator Sasha Dugdale will be reading from Holy Winter 20/21 at this famous Parisian bookshop alongside the poet Ishion Hutchinson.
Free event - more details here.
PAST EVENTS
BLOODAXE ONLINE LAUNCH EVENT - Holy Winter 20/21
Tuesday 19 March 2024, 7pm
Launch reading by Jane Hirshfield (USA) and Maria Stepanova (Russia) with Sasha Dugdale
This free Bloodaxe launch event was streamed on YouTube Live and is now available on this YouTube page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uV8-QP8bdxg.
BLOODAXE ONLINE LAUNCH EVENT - War of the Beasts and the Animals
Bloodaxe Books launch, Tuesday 23 March 2021, Maria Stepanova (with Sasha Dugdale) and Pia Tafdrup
[08 March 2024]
