Maria Stepanova

Writer, poet, journalist and essayist born in Moscow. She is one of the great figures of Russian literature of her generation. She is the founder and editor of the cultural magazine Colta, a completely independent, free, crowdfunded media, in which people write about art, music, film, literature, theater and science. Since the beginning of the Ukrainian war, the website has been blocked by the Russian Telecommunications Supervisory Service and is no longer open on the territory of the Russian Federation.

Stepanova received in 2005 the Andrey Biely Prize for poetry, and among her collections of poems translated into English are The Flower Dies under a Skin of Glass (The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2019) and War of the Beasts and the Animals (Bloodaxe Books, 2021). In 2018 he received the most recognized literary award in Russia, the Big Book prize, with the novel In Memory of Memory, translated into Spanish by Jorge Ferrer and published in Acantilado (2022). With this work, Stepanova proposes a journey into the memory of her family, a journey that is also an X-ray of a century of Russian history. The author currently lives in exile in Berlin.