Maria Stepanova's Holy Winter 20/21 longlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation
Russian poet Maria Stepanova’s book-length poem Holy Winter 20/21, published in March 2024 by Bloodaxe Books and translated by Sasha Dugdale, is one of 15 titles longlisted for the eighth annual award of the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2024. The longlist was announced on 17 October 2024.
The £1000 prize was established by the University of Warwick in 2017 to address the gender imbalance in translated literature and to increase the number of international women’s voices accessible by a British and Irish readership. The prize is judged by Amanda Hopkinson, Boyd Tonkin and Susan Bassnett.
In 2021, Maria Stepanova was shortlisted for the same prize for two of her books: War of the Beasts and the Animals (Bloodaxe Books), a selection of her recent poetry, and her meta-memoir In Memory of Memory (Fitzcarraldo Editions). Both were translated by poet and Russian specialist Sasha Dugdale.
The 2024 competition received a total of 147 eligible entries from 35 languages. This is the widest selection of languages in the history of the prize with Kazakh represented for the first time. The longlist covers 10 languages with Arabic, German, Italian, Japanese and Russian represented twice. For the first time, the longlist includes a title from Lebanon.
The judges said of the 2024 longlist:
“For the eighth time, this unique award spotlights the talents of women writers - and the skills of their translators - from across the globe. This year, our longlisted books come from South Sudan and South Korea, Brazil and Poland, Japan and Sweden, Russia and Italy. The prize also honours the entire spectrum of literary creativity. Our choices salute not only works of prose fiction, long and short, ranging from suburban satire to historical crime, but (among other kinds of writing) a verse novel, a graphic memoir, an illustrated autobiographical essay - even a visionary collection of newspaper columns.”
Prize coordinator, Dr Holly Langstaff of the University of Warwick’s School of Creative Arts, Performance and Visual Cultures, comments:
“Thanks to the excellent work of translators and publishers, readers in the UK and Ireland continue to have access to a wide range of women's voices and experiences from across the globe. The longlist includes several translators who have not before featured and showcases the work of independent publishers, who dominate the list of submissions.”
The shortlist for the prize will be published at the end of October. The winner will be announced at a ceremony at The Shard in London on Thursday 21 November 2024.
The prize is generously supported in 2024 by the School of Creative Arts, Performance and Visual Cultures and the British Centre for Literary Translation.
Details of all the longlisted titles are on the University of Warwick website here.
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Maria Stepanova is one of Russia’s most innovative and exciting poets and thinkers. Her book-length poem Holy Winter 20/21 was published by Bloodaxe in March 2024, and is translated by poet and Russian specialist Sasha Dugdale. It was a Poetry Book Society Translation Choice for Spring 2024 and is on the longlist for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2024.
Holy Winter 20/21 speaks of winter and war, of banishment and exile, of social isolation and existential abandonment. Stepanova finds sublime imagery for the process of falling silent, interweaving love letters and travelogues, Chinese verse and Danish fairy tales into a polyphonic evocation of frozen and slowly thawing time.
Maria Stepanova was founding editor of Colta.ru, an independent cultural website which engaged with the cultural, social and political reality of contemporary Russia until the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, when all dissenting media in Russia were forced to shut down. As a prominent critic of Putin’s regime, Stepanova had to leave Russia and is now living in exile. Coltra.ru has been compared to Huffington Post in its status and importance.
Her prize-winning meta-memoir In Memory of Memory (Fitzcarraldo Editions) was published in February 2021, followed in March 2021 by her first full English-language poetry book War of the Beasts and the Animals (Bloodaxe Books), a Poetry Book Society Translation Choice. Both books were translated by Sasha Dugdale, and were both shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2021. In Memory of Memory was also shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize and the 2022 James Tait Black Prize for Biography, and was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2021. In 2023 Maria Stepanova was awarded the Berman Literature Prize for In Memory of Memory. A third book by Stepanova, The Voice Over: Poems and Essays, edited by Irina Shevelenko, was published by Columbia University Press in the US in its Russian Library series in 2021. Her book-length poem Holy Winter 20/21 (Bloodaxe Books, 2024), a Poetry Book Society Translation Choice, is longlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2024.
Sasha Dugdale has translated many works of Russian poetry, prose and drama, including Tatiana Shcherbina's Life Without: Selected Poetry & Prose 1992-2003 (Bloodaxe Books, 2004) and Elena Shvarts’s Birdsong on the Seabed (Bloodaxe Books, 2008), as well as two poetry titles from Maria Stepanova, War of the Beasts and the Animals (Bloodaxe Books, 2021) and Holy Winter 20/21 (Bloodaxe Books, 2024). She was editor of Modern Poetry in Translation from 2013 to 2017, and is co-editor of Centres of Cataclysm: Celebrating 50 Years of Modern Poetry in Translation. An interview with Sasha Dugdale about translating from Russian, poetry, and publishing, can be read here.
For interviews, poem features and reviews for Holy Winter 20/23, see Bloodaxe's news page here.
BLOODAXE ONLINE LAUNCH EVENT FOR HOLY WINTER 20/21
Tuesday 19 March 2024, 7pm
Launch reading by Jane Hirshfield (USA) and Maria Stepanova (Russia) with translator Sasha Dugdale
This free Bloodaxe launch event was streamed on YouTube Live and is now available on this YouTube page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uV8-QP8bdxg.
Jane Hirshfield, Maria Stepanova and translator Sasha Dugdale from their new books, and discussed them with each other and with host Neil Astley. Maria read in Russian, with Sasha reading her English translations. An international event of exceptional quality.
[17 October 2024]
