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Poet, novelist, essayist, and journalist Maria Stepanova is the author of ten poetry collections and three books of essays. She was awarded the Berman Literature Prize for In Memory of Memory, and was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, and the James Tait Black Prize for Biography. She also founded the online independent crowd-sourced journal Colta.ru, which engages with the cultural, social, and political reality of contemporary Russia. More about this author >
Sasha Dugdale is a poet and translator. Her sixth book of poetry is The Strongbox. Deformations was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot and Derek Walcott Prizes. Her long poem "Joy" won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem of 2016. Dugdale's translation of Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory was shortlisted for the International Booker, a Finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature, and winner of the Modern Language Association’s Lois Roth Award. More about this author >
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From the publisher:
The writer M has lived in the city of B ever since her homeland declared war on a neighboring state. While in exile, she is unable to write and suffers from loneliness, shame, and despair. But then M is invited to give a reading at a literary festival in a nearby country, and after a series of missed connections and mishaps, including losing her phone, she finds herself all alone in the wrong coastal town. She feels a flicker of liberation—the possibility of starting over—but memories of childhood, books, films and tarot cards pull her back, the last fragments of a vanishing world. Then she meets a troupe of circus performers who invite her to join them….
In this brief interlude, severed from reality, it seems as if M may finally escape from herself, from her past, from her nationality. The Disappearing Act oscillates between reality and dream, between an oppressive present and a lost past, between life and literature.
