BONUS FREE CRIME NOVEL! PROMOTIONS
Maria Stepanova is a poet, novelist, essayist, journalist and the author of ten poetry collections and three books of essays. Her book War of the Beasts and the Animals (Bloodaxe Books, 2021), translated by Sasha Dugdale, was the first English translation of her poetry. It was a Poetry Book Society Translation Choice and was shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2021. Stepanova has received several Russian and international literary awards (including the prestigious Andrey Bely Prize and Joseph Brodsky Fellowship). Her documentary novel In Memory of Memory won Russia's Big Book Award in 2018 and was shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize. As a prominent critic of Putin's regime, Stepanova had to leave Russia and is now living in exile in Berlin.
Wildly experimental, and yet movingly traditional. Ironic, and yet obsessed with spell-making. Full of allusions to various different canonical voices, and yet heart-wrenchingly direct. What, friends, is this? It’s that glorious thing: the poetry of Maria Stepanova. -- Ilya Kaminsky * Poetry Book Society Bulletin * The Warwick Prize for Women in Translation has also done important work in shifting the gender imbalance, with Sasha Dugdale’s translation of Maria Stepanova, War of the Beasts and the Animals on the shortlist this year and surely likely to appear on many books of 2021 lists. I can only compare my experience of reading the title poem to that of reading ‘The Waste Land’ for the first time – it is so astonishing, and the effort that has gone into translating it immense. -- Clare Pollard * TS Eliot Prize website * Stepanova’s poetry is porous. Were it a fabric, it would be complete with rents through which darkness – and truth – might leak… Stepanova is a powerhouse. Her scornful wit is bracing and, throughout, the reader is on a switchback: you never know what waits around the next bend. -- Kate Kellaway * The Observer *
