Portraits

Elaine Feinstein was a poet, novelist, and biographer. She received many prizes, including a Cholmondeley Award for Poetry, Society of Authors', Wingate and Arts Council Awards, and an Honorary D.Litt from the University of Leicester. She travelled across the world to read her poems, and her books have been translated into most European languages; also Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Her versions of the poems of Marina Tsvetaeva, a New York Times Book of the Year, have remained in print since 1971. She was given a major grant from the Arts Council to write her novel, The Russian Jerusalem, a phantasmagoric mix of prose and poetry (Carcanet, 2008). Her collection Cities came out in 2010, Portraits in 2015 and her new and selected poems, The Clinic, Memory, in 2017. She served on the Council of the Royal Society of Literature, of which she was a Fellow, as a judge for many literary awards, and as a Chair of the Judges for the T.S.Eliot Award. She received a Civil List Pension in 2010. She died in September 2019.

Elaine Feinstein has a page on the Poetry Archive website, where you can listen to recordings of her reading from her work, and access other useful resources. Click here.