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Maria Stepanova

Maria Stepanova (b 1972, Russia) is a poet, essayist and journalist. She has been particularly notable as a powerful voice for press freedom in times of censorship.

She is the author of ten poetry collections and two books of essays, and the recipient of the Andrei Bely Prize, Russia’s oldest independent literary award. In 2007, she founded OpenSpace.ru (later renamed COLTA.RU), now one of Russia’s leading online journals and the country’s only independent, crowd-funded source of cultural information. Her latest book has so far been translated to Swedish (Minnen av minnet) and German (Nach dem Gedächtnis), and is under translation to English.

Her poems have been translated into multiple languages, and her essays on the political and cultural situation in Russia have been widely published in international media outlets, appearing in English and German. She has been a lifelong resident of Moscow.

A supernova in her native land... among the most visible figures in post-Soviet culture.

The Book Haven on Maria Stepanova

She shares with her beloved W. G. Sebald a sense of the haunting of history, the marks it leaves on the fabric of landscape.

Sasha Dugdale, Maria Stepanova’s English translator, in an introduction to her work
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