Valentina Polukhina (1936-2021) was a British-Russian scholar, Emeritus Professor at Keele University, and the widow of Daniel Weissbort. Born in Siberia, she was educated at Kemerovo, Tula and Moscow universities. From 1962 to 1973 she taught at Moscow's Lumumba University and from 1973 until 2001 was Professor at Keele University, organising many visits by Russian writers to Keele and other universities or reading venues. She was the author and editor of major studies of Joseph Brodsky, as well as publications on poets such as Akhmatova, Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Khlebnikov and Mandelstam. She edited Evgeny Rein’s Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2001), and co-edited An Anthology of Russian Women Poets with Daniel Weissbort, which was published as an issue of Modern Poetry in Translation and as a separate book in the US by the University of Iowa Press (2005). Most recently, she published her Anthology of poems dedicated to Joseph Brodsky - Ia nezabyvshikh menia. Antologiya stikhov, posviashchennykh Brodskomu (Tomsk, 2015). In 2014 she was awarded the A.C.Benson Medal by the Royal Society of Literature.
