Maxim Amelin

Poet, critic, editor, and translator, Maxim Amelin is among the last generation of Russian poets to grow up in the Soviet Union, or as the poet Aleksei Tsvetkov wrote in Poetry Magazine: "those in the thirty- to forty-year-old range... the children of perestroika--or one should say the orphans, since their alleged mother went missing long ago" (February 2008). The recipient of numerous national awards, including the Moscow Reckoning Award, the Anti-Booker, the Novyi Mir Prize, and the Bunin Prize, his work has been translated into over a dozen languages. In 2013 Amelin won the prestigious Solzhenitsyn Prize for his contributions to Russian poetry. The author of three books of poetry, including Cold Odes (Холодные оды, 1996), Dubia (1999), and The Horse of the Gorgon (Конь Горгоны, 2003), he recently published his collected poetry and prose, Bent Speech (Гнутая речь, 2011). An accomplished translator of Pindar, Catullus, Homer, and various contemporary poets, he currently lives in Moscow. He serves as editor-in-chief at OGI, a leading publisher of contemporary literature, and is a member of the Russian PEN-Club. He was born in Kursk.