About the authors
Maria Stepanova is a poet, essayist, and novelist. She was born in Moscow but currently resides in Berlin. Her novel In Memory of Memory (English translation published by New Directions and Fitzcarraldo) won the Prix du Meilleur livre étranger and was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. Awards for her poetry include the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding.
Eugene Ostashevsky is a poet and translator whose writing is described as “translingual” because of its focus on linguistic multiplicity and interference. His latest poetry collection, The Feeling Sonnets (Carcanet / NYRB Poets, 2022), examines the effects of speaking a non-native language on emotions, parenting, and identity. An earlier book, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi (NYRB Poets, 2017), discusses communication difficulties between pirates and parrots. Translated into German by Uljana Wolf and Monika Rinck as Der Pirat, der von Pi den Wert nicht kennt (KookBooks, 2017), it won the 2019 Preis der Stadt Münster für Internationale Poesie. He first moved to Berlin as a fellow at the 2013 DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm.
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