Christopher Arkell is the chief shareholder in the London Magazine. He also owns the London Miscellany and writes occasional pieces on current affairs for the European Journal. He has published translations, done in collaboration with Eugene Dubnov, of other Russian poets, including Pushkin.
Kevin Carey is a poet and translator. He was educated at Williams College, Massachusetts, and at Georgetown University, Washington. For some years Carey has been a member of the U.S. diplomatic corps. For the last ten years he has worked in Jerusalem.
Vitaly Chernetsky was born in 1970 in Odessa, Ukraine. He has a doctorate in comparative literature (University of Pennsylvania, 1996) and teaches in the Slavic Department at Columbia University. He has co-edited the anthology Crossing Centuries: The New Generation in Russian Poetry (2000). His translations from Russian and Ukrainian have appeared in Bald Ego, boundary 2, Five Fingers Review, PEN International, and Two Lines, among other publications, and in the anthologies Out of the Blue: Russia’s Hidden Gay Literature (1997) and A Hundred Years of Youth: Twentieth-Century Ukrainian Poetry (2000).
Jenefer Coates taught literary translation at Middlesex University and also works as a translator, writer, and editor. Until recently she co-edited In Other Words, the journal of the Translators Association. She is writing a book on Vladimir Nabokov and translation.
Maura Dooley has edited Making for Planet Alice: New Women Poets (1997). The Honey Gatherers: A Book of Love Poems was published in 2003. She is the author of the non-fiction book How Novelists Work (2000). Her latest collection, Sound Barrier: Poems 1982–2002 (2003), draws on several collections, two of which were Poetry Book Society Recommendations and one of which was short-listed for the T. S. Eliot Prize.
Terence Dooley has published original work in many magazines and journals, most recently the Swansea Review and Smiths Knoll. He translates widely from Spanish, Italian, and French and has just completed a verse translation of Paul Valéry’s Le jeune parque.
Yury Drobyshev was born in Leningrad and graduated from the Naval Engineering Academy. He emigrated to Britain in 1978. He has contributed to the anthology The Poetry of Perestroika (1989) as well as to the Irina Ratushinskaya collection Pencil Letter (1988) and, with Carol Rumens, to Evgeny Rein: Selected Poems (2001).
Ruth Fainlight recently published her twelfth collection of poems, Burning Wire. The title poem of her previous book, Sugar-Paper Blue (short-listed for the 1998 Whitbread Poetry Award), is based on a visit to Leningrad in 1965 and the shock of discovering that the footsteps she could hear in the flat above were those of Anna Ahkmatova. Collections of her poems have been published in Portuguese, French, and Spanish translation, and she has published translations from the same languages.
Elaine Feinstein is a poet and novelist. In 1980 she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 1990 she received a Cholmondeley Award for Poetry and was given an Honorary D.Lit. from the University of Leicester. Her versions of Marina Tsvetaeva have remained in print since 1970. Her most recent books of poems are Daylight (1997), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and Gold (2000). Her fourteenth novel, Dark Inheritance, and her biography Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet were published in 2001. Her Collected Poems and Translations, a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation, was published in 2002.
Roy Fisher was born in 1930 in Handsworth, Birmingham. A poet and jazz piano-player, he has worked as a school and college teacher. He retired as senior lecturer in American Studies from Keele University in 1982. He is now a freelance writer and lives in Derbyshire. Fisher is the author of several collections of poetry, including Poems, 1955–1987 (1988), and The Dow Low Drop: New and Selected Poems (1996). He was recently appointed poet laureate emeritus of his native city, Birmingham.
Peter France, who recently retired from a chair in French at Edinburgh University, has translated An Anthology of Chuvash Poetry (1991) and collections of poems by Gennady Aygi, Joseph Brodsky, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and (with Jon Stallworthy) Aleksandr Blok and Boris Pasternak. He is the author of Poets of Modern Russia (1982) and the editor of the Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation (2000).
Gerald Janecek was born in New York in 1945. He is a professor of Russian at the University of Kentucky. He specializes in avant-garde Russian poetry and has written on and translated Andrey Bely, Russian Futurist poetry, and contemporary Russian poetry. He is the author of The Look of Russian Poetry (1984), ZAUM: The Transrational Poetry of Russian Futurism (1996), Sight and Sound Entwined: Studies of the New Russian Poetry (2000), and a number of articles on these subjects.
Chris Jones graduated in Russian Studies from Keele University, where he also worked on a dissertation on Joseph Brodsky’s rhymes. He has translated many academic papers, some poetry, and an as yet unpublished novel by Dmitry Savitsky.
J. Kates is a poet and literary translator who lives in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire. He is the editor of the Zephyr anthology In the Grip of Strange Thoughts (1999). Recently he published his own translation of Tatyana Shcherbina’s collection of poems The Score of the Game (2003).
Catriona Kelly is reader in Russian at Oxford and tutorial fellow at New College. She has a large number of publications about Russian literature and cultural history, including, most recently, Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction (2001). Published translations include work by various Russian poets and prose writers in her anthologies Utopias: Russian Modernist Texts 1905–1940 (1999) and An Anthology of Russian Women’s Writing, 1777–1992 (1994) as well as novels by Leonid Borodin (1989) and Sergey Kaledin (1990) and poems by Elena Shvarts (in Paradise, 1993) and Olga Sedakova (in The Silk of Time, 1994).
Elizabeth Krizenesky, instructor of Russian at both Lawrence University and Fox Valley Technical College, Appleton, Wisconsin, has a B.A. from Ripon College in Ripon, Wisconsin. In addition to teaching, she both translates and interprets Russian. Her translation of Gorbanevskaya’s poem was performed at an International Women’s Day celebration at Lawrence University in 2002.
Dmitry Kuzmin was born in 1968 and graduated from Moscow Pedagogical University. He has published poetry since 1980 and also articles on contemporary literature, as well as translations of contemporary English, French, and Belorussian poetry. Kuzmin has won a number of prizes, including the Arion Prize (1996) and the Andrey Bely Prize (2002). He is best known as the founder of the Union of Young Writers, Vavilon (1989), and chief editor of the publishing house ARGO-RISK (1993). He runs the Avtornik literary club (founded in 1996) and has organized a number of literary festivals. Kuzmin edits several magazines, including Vavilon, Triton, and RISK (an almanac of gay literature).
Angela Livingstone is emeritus professor of Russian at Essex University and has written widely on Russian literature, translating Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva (The Rat-Catcher, 1999) and, with Robert Chandler, works by Andrey Platonov (1999).
Alex Marshall was a Russian tutor, translator, and interpreter and lectured in Russian, German, and English Studies at Northbrook College, Worthing.
Fay Marshall is a widely published poet with two collections: and (1991) and Mapping the Debris (2000). She and her late husband, Alex, translated a large number of poems from Russian and German together.
Christopher Mattison studied Russian and received an MFA in translation from the University of Iowa. He is currently the managing editor of Zephyr Press and the co-director of Adventures in Poetry, in Boston.
James McGavran recently finished undergraduate studies at Kenyon College, Ohio, where he majored in modern languages and literatures. He will begin graduate school in Slavic literatures at Princeton University in 2002. He intends to focus on contemporary Russian poetry and translation.
Richard McKane’s first book was Selected Poems of Anna Akhmatova (1969). He has co-translated, with Elizabeth McKane, the poetry of Osip Mandelstam, and his translation of Nikolay Gumilev was published as The Pillar of Fire: Selected Poems (1999). Among his numerous translations are selections by Leonid Aronzon and Olga Sedakova, as well as an anthology: Ten Russian Poets: Surviving the Twentieth Century (2003). His translations from Turkish (co-translated with Ruth Christie) are numerous. Since 1980 he has made his home in London, where he works as an interpreter and co-chairs the Pushkin Club. His own poetry has been published in Turkey with translations into Turkish. A selection of his poems on poetry along with translations was published as Poet for Poet (1998, 2001).
Alan Myers graduated in Russian from London University and studied at Moscow University, 1960–1961. He taught Russian and English for over twenty years, during which time he published reviews, translations, and educational articles and also worked as an interpreter for the British Council in Britain and the USSR. Since 1986 he has worked as a freelance literary translator, including mimetic rhymed versions of nineteenth-century Russian poetry, An Age Ago (1989). Major translations include Dostoevsky’s The Idiot (1992) as well as Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades and Other Stories (1997). Myers has translated poems and essays for Joseph Brodsky as well as the latter’s two plays Marbles (1988) and Democracy! (1990). He was born in County Durham and is author of Myers’ Literary Guide: The North East (1995,1997) and co-author of W. H. Auden: Pennine Poet (1999).
Max Nemtsov writes: “Well, there’s not much to say. I’m thirty-nine, born in Vladivostok, currently live in Moscow, a freelance translator/editor, am responsible for the Speaking in Tongues web publication (http://spintongues.msk.ru/).”
Robert Reid is reader in modern languages (Russian) at Keele University. He has written and edited many books and articles on Romanticism and is co-editor of Essays in Poetics, the journal of the British Neo-Formalist Circle, to which he has also regularly contributed translations of modern Russian poetry. He has translated Russian poetry for various other collections and anthologies, including work by Brodsky, Prigov, and Sedakova.
Carol Rumens has published eleven collections of poetry, a novel, short stories, and literary journalism and has edited several anthologies. With Yury Drobyshev she has contributed translations from the Russian to several publications, including Evgeny Rein: Selected Poems (2002) and After Pushkin (1999). Recent poetry books include Best China Sky (1995) and Holding Pattern (1998). Based in Belfast for some years, she has held several residencies and currently teaches at the University of Bangor, North Wales.
Stephanie Sandler is a scholar of modern Russian poetry and of the Pushkin period, with a special interest in women’s writing. Her publications include Distant Pleasures: Alexander Pushkin and the Writing of Exile (1989) and several edited collections, including Sexuality and the Body in Russian Culture (with Jane T. Costlow and Judith Vowles, 1993) and Rereading Russian Poetry (1999). She is professor of Slavic languages and literatures at Harvard University.
Jason Schneiderman was educated at the University of Maryland, New York University, and the Herzen Institute (St. Petersburg, Russia). His poems have appeared in The Penguin Book of the Sonnet and other places. His essays have appeared in Frigate. He teaches creative writing at Hofstra (New York) and lives in New York City.
Steven Seymour is a freelance simultaneous interpreter of Russian, currently based in New York.
Alan Shaw has published translations of Pushkin (Mozart and Salieri) and Aleksandr Griboedov. His own poems have appeared in Grand Street and Partisan Review. He also writes drama, music, and essays. Currently he is living in New York.
Dennis Silk (1928–1998) was born in London and after 1955 lived in Jerusalem. His collections of poetry include Punished Land (1980), Hold Fast (1984), Catwalk and Overpass (1990), and William the Wonder-Kid: Plays, Puppet Plays, and Theater Writings (1996).
Nika Skandiaka (Anna Khazin) was born in Moscow and raised in the United States. Her translations have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, Absinthe: New Writing from Europe, and the online magazine Speaking in Tongues (www.spintongues.com).
Derek Walcott, poet and playwright, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. His epic poem Omeros appeared in 1990. Born in Castries, St. Lucia, in 1930, Walcott divides his time between St. Lucia and New York. Apart from Pavlova’s and Shcherbina’s works, he has produced translations of some other poetry, notably work by his close friend Joseph Brodsky.