Maria Stepanova is a poet, essayist and journalist. Born in 1972, she graduated from Moscow Literary Institute in 1995. She is the author of ten poetry collections and three books of essays, and a recipient of several Russian and international literary awards. Her documentary novel In Memory of Memory, which blends memoir, documents, and essays into an epic narrative, came out in Russian in November 2017 and received the Big Book Prize in December 2018 and NOS prize in February 2019, as well as the Brücke Berlin Prize in 2020. In Memory of Memory and the poetry collection War of the Beasts and the Animals are both due out in English translation by Sasha Dugdale in 2021. Maria Stepanova is the founder and editor-in-chief of COLTA.RU, a crowdfunded online daily covering cultural, social, and political life in Russia and abroad.

Photo: Andrey Natotsinsky