Guests of Eternity

LARISSA MILLER is a major Russian lyrical poet and author of many short stories, essays and articles in periodicals, and of fourteen books, one in English translation ('Dim and Distant Days', Glas, 2000). A member of the Union of Russian Writers since 1979, and of the Russian Pen-Centre since 1992, she was short-listed in 1999 for the State Prize of the Russian Federation, having been nominated for the prize by the famous literary almanac Novyi Mir. Many poems by Larissa Miller have been set to music, in Russia by Michael Prikhod'ko (who has released three discs of songs to Miller's words), and in the UK by Helen Chadwick. In 2003, 49 of Larissa Miller's poems were put together as a theatrical 'Poetical Performance' which played at various Moscow theatres. Born in 1940 Larissa Miller graduated from the Foreign Languages Institute in Moscow and for many years worked as a teacher of English, but since 1980 she has been teaching a women's musical gymnastics system named after its creator, the renowned Russian dancer Lyudmila Alexeeva. RICHARD McKANE was born in 1947 and read Russian at Oxford, his 'Selected Poems of Anna Akhmatova' (Penguin / OUP) appearing in 1969. He lived in Turkey for six years in the 1970s, working on an archaeological dig in Kandahar, Afghanistan for some of this time. In 1978 he was awarded the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University where he met his former wife Elizabeth, with whom he later he brought out Mandelstam's Moscow and Voronezh Notebooks. For over eighteen years, he worked as an interpreter from, and into, Turkish and Russian at the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture. As a translator, Richard McKane, working with Ruth Christie, has brought out two selections of Oktay Rifat's work, Voices of Memory and Poems and, with Talat Halman, Beyond the Walls: Poems of Nazum Hikmet; he has also translated the work of Nikolai Gumilyov, Olga Sedakova and Aronzon. As a poet, he has had two bilingual books published in Turkey, 'Turkey Poems' and 'Coffee House Poems', and a selection, 'Amphora for Matphors' in New York. Richard McKane has retired from interpreting, and now lives in the provinces, concentrating on his translation and poetry.SASHA DUGDALE has published two poetry collections, 'Notebook' (Carcanet / Oxford Poets, 2003) and 'The Estate' (Carcanet / Oxford Poets, 2007). She translates Russian plays for several theatres in the UK and the USA, her translations including 'Plasticine' by Vassilii Sigarev (winner of the Evening Standard New Play of the Year Award), 'Terrorism and Playing the Victim' by the Presnyakov Brothers and Chekhov's 'Cherry Orchard' (produced by BBC Radio in Autumn 2008). Her translations of Russian poetry are published by Bloodaxe. The most recent, a collection of poetry by Elena Shvarts entitled Birdsong on the Seabed (2008), was a PBS Recommended Translation.