Kyiv / Berlin
Mark Belorusez (1943), is a Ukrainian translator into Russian from German and Ukrainian of works of Austrian, German, Ukrainian and Swiss literature. His works include the translation of such authors as Paul Celan, Georg Trakl, Mánes Sperber, Julian Schutting, Oleg Lysheha, Herta Müller, Hertha Kräftner, Jan Wagner, Esther Kinsky, Ulrich Becher, Durs Grünbein and others. He has received several prizes for his works including Translator's Prize of the Republic of Austria, 1998 (Übersetzerpreis der Republik Österreich), Andrei Bely Prize, 2008 (Andrej-Belyj-Preis), and the Literary Prize of the Arts Foundation of North Rhine-Westphalia - Straelen Prize, 2023 (Literaturpreis der Kunststiftung NRW – Straelen Obersetzerpreis)
Kyiv, Ukraine
Natalka Bilocerkivec is a Ukrainian poet and essayist, author of seven book translated into several languages. Her English collection Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow was shortlisted for Derek Walcott Prize and Griffin Poetry Prize in 2022.
Uppsala University
Olga Engfelt is a literary scholar, writer, and essayist. Over the past ten years, she has been affiliated with Åbo Akademi University in Finland, where her research has focused on Finland-Swedish modernism in relation to Russian literary, religious, and intellectual traditions. She has collaborated with the Finland-Swedish journal Nya Argus, contributing several articles on Russian cultural and religious figures. She is also the author of two short story collections.
Earlier in her career, she worked in Russia as a researcher, university lecturer, translator, and writer.
Since January 2024, she has been affiliated with the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies (IRES) in Uppsala, where she is conducting a research project on the legacy of empire in post-Soviet literature and its reception in Western literary criticism.
Writer and Scholar
Irena Grudzińska Gross retired from her institutional commitments. She is now translating into English her just published biography of Alexander Weissberg-Cybulski (Znak, Poland).
Freie University
Universität Göttingen
Uppsala University
Zakhar Ishov is a Research Fellow at Uppsala University. He has been awarded two doctoral degrees: Freie Universität Berlin in English Literature and Translation Studies (2008); and from Yale University in Russian Literature (2015). His monograph Brodsky in English appeared in 2023 with Northwestern University Press. His project “Dangerous Russian Poets: The Case of Natalya Gorbanevskaya and Joseph Brodsky – Poetry as Political Resistance” has been awarded a grant from the Swedish Research Council in 2023. His research focuses on theory and practices of translation, on the works of Brodsky, Nabokov, Mandelstam, Gorbanevskaya, on experiences of exile, transcultural communication, multilingualism, and it uses a multidisciplinary approach to study the connection between poetry/translation and politics.
Uppsala University
Stanford University
Ilya Kukulin is a literary critic, cultural historian, and cultural sociologist. Currently, he is a visiting lecturer at Stanford University. He authored a book Machines of the Noisy Time: How the Soviet Montage Became an Aesthetic Method of the Unofficial Culture (Moscow, 2015) and co-authored a monograph A Guerilla Logos: The Project of Dmitry Aleksandrovich Prigov (Moscow, 2022, with Mark Lipovetsky); in 2019, he also published a volume of selected articles and essays The Breakthrough to an Impossible Connection.
Aleksanteri Institute, Helsinki
Anatoly Pinsky is an historian of modern Russia and Europe. He is a Wihuri Foundation research fellow at the Aleksanteri Institute of the University of Helsinki. He is currently working on a book on Stalin- and post-Stalin-era lyric poetry.
Cambridge, UK
Rebecca Reich is Associate Professor of Russian Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature, and Dissent After Stalin (2018), which won the prize for Best First Book from the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages, and a co-editor of The New Cambridge History of Russian Literature (2024). She is also the Consultant Editor for Russia, East-Central Europe and Eurasia at the Times Literary Supplement.
University of Alberta
Allan Reid recently retired from the University of New Brunswick, where he taught courses in Russian language, literature and culture, and comparative cultural studies. He served as the President of the Canadian Association of Slavists and was its most recent Honorary President. His research includes work on Bakhtin and Lotman, as well as on Isaac Babel, Holocaust Literature, and other topics. Recently, most of his publications and presentations have been focussed on the life and work of Natal’ia Gorbanevskaia.
University of Warsaw
Mykola Riabchuk is a Principal Research Fellow at the Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies in Kyiv and, currently, a visiting researcher at the George Washington University. His latest books (in English) are Eastern Europe since 1989: Between the Loosened Authoritarianism and Unconsolidated Democracy (Warsaw, 2020), and At the Fence of Metternich’s Garden. Essays on Europe, Ukraine, and Europeanization (Stuttgart, 2021). His Ukrainian collection of essays “Nationalist’s Lexicon” (2021) was distinguished with Taras Shevchenko National Prize in arts and literature.
ZfL, Berlin
University of Lodz (The Eastern Bloc Censorship Research Group)
In my literary work, I seek what is, what could be, and what never was. In my scholarly work, I explore censorship and the complexities of freedom of speech. I’ve received a few awards for both, though I can’t quite remember which ones or why. I love wandering the world with my two- and four-legged loved ones by my side. More about me: http://anna-wisniewska-grabarczyk.eu
Kyiv / Berlin
Alla Zamanskaia is a theatre and television director, sound engineer and music editor, radio host, and lecturer at the theatre university. In addition, she is author of musical arrangements for more than 20 performances in various theaters.