Quick Study: Lev Oborin is a poet, critic, and essayist who also translates poetry from English and Polish.
The Oborin File: Lev Oborin made a name for himself as a poet by being named to the short list of the Debut Prize in 2004 and 2008. He has amassed a long list of credits in prestigious Russian “thick” journals, which regularly publish his original and translated poetry, criticism, and essays. He won an award from the journal Znamia in 2011 for a piece about Russian-Soviet writer Grigory Baklanov. Oborin is also editor of Bookshelf (Полка), a site where literature specialists select and describe classic works (some contemporary) of Russian literature.
Quick Study: Polina Klyukina is a journalist and fiction writer who depicts harsh realities of Russian life.
The Klyukina File: Polina Klyukina won the Debut award for short prose in 2009 after making the prize’s short list in 2008. Klyukina studied journalism in Moscow and has written for publications including Russian Newspaper. She began writing at 17 and was first published in the Russian “thick” journal Novyi mir in 2009 when she was still a student at the Moscow Literary Institute. Klyukina’s first book, a short story collection called Fight or Flight, was released in 2012.
Psssst………: Klyukina’s first post-secondary education was in stage direction.
Quick Study: Alisa Ganieva is a literary critic and fiction writer who won the Debut Prize in 2009 for a novella about one young man’s day in Makhachkala, Dagestan.
The Ganieva File: Ganieva won the Debut Prize for Salam, Dalgat!, which she wrote under the pseudonym Gulla Khirachev because of Dagestani cultural norms: Ganieva explains her choice by saying it’s indecorous for a woman to wander a city or write much about street life. Her second novel, called The Mountain and the Wall in Carol Apollonio's translation, is also about the Caucasus; it was nominated for the National Bestseller Award in manuscript form in early 2012 and released as a book in fall 2012. Ganieva's Bride and Groom was shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize and won the Booker's translation grant; Apollonio translated that novel into English, too. Ganieva's other projects have included writing for Independent Newspaper’s literary supplement and hosting a radio show on Echo of Moscow.
Psssst………: Ganieva admitted in an interview that her husband told her drafts of her early writings about the Caucasus were “impossibly boring.” His critical comments inspired her to rewrite, resulting in Salam, Dalgat!, which won her the Debut Prize. Also: the “Gulla” in Ganieva’s pseudonym means “bullet” in Avar.
Quick Study: Vadim Levental is an active participant in numerous branches of Russia's literary world, writing fiction and criticism, editing his own imprint at a publishing house, and serving as secretary of the National Bestseller Award.
The Levental File: Although Levental began publishing in Russian "thick" journals in the early 2000s, he first gained wide recognition in the 2010s for compiling and editing a four-volume Literary Matrix set that collects essays by contemporary Russian writers about Russian literary classics. The Matrix books achieved national fame as one of the most successful literary projects of the post-Soviet period. Levental’s first novel, Masha Regina (2012), the portrait of a young woman from a small city who becomes a world-famous film director, was shortlisted for the Big Book prize and translated into English; his second book, a collection of stories called The Fright Room, came out in 2015. Levental is executive secretary of the National Bestseller Prize and coordinator of the Grigoriev Poetry Prize; in 2016, he represented Russia at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
