Maxim Amelin

Born: 1970

Maxim Amelin is a poet, essayist, translator, researcher of poetry, and publisher. Born in 1970 in the city of Kursk in Western Russia, he studied at the Gorky Literary Institute in Saint Petersburg, and for fourteen years was the director of Saint Petersburg’s Symposium Publishing House. He currently lives in Moscow, where he is the Editor-in-Chief for OGI Publishing House.

Amelin is the author of three books of poetry, Cold Odes (1996), Dubia (1999), The Gorgon’s Steed (2003), and the collection of poetry, articles and essays The Curved Speech (2011). His poems have been translated into Armenian, Chinese, Croatian, English, French, Hungarian, Georgian, German, Italian, Latvian, Spanish, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Serbian, Vietnamese, and other languages. He is also the author of numerous articles and essays about poets and poetry and has compiled a number of poetry anthologies, including An Anthology of Contemporary Russian Poetry (Beijing: National Literature, 2006).

Amelin is the recipient of numerous literary awards, including the Anti-Booker (1998), the prestigious Moscow Count Prize (2004, 2012), the Bunin Prize (2012) and, most recently, the Solzhenitsyn Prize (2013).  He is a member of the Russian PEN Center and the Guild of Literary Translators. In the U.S., Amelin’s poetry is included in Crossing Centuries: The New Generation in Russian Poetry (Talisman House Publishers, 2000).