The outbreak of Covid-19 cut short Maria Stepanova’s stay in Cambridge. Back in Russia, she spent the ensuing months in a state of torpor – the world had withdrawn from her, time had ‘gone numb’. When she awoke from this state, she began to read Ovid, and the shock of the pandemic dissolved into the voices and metaphors of an epochal experience. Her book-length poem Holy Winter 20/21, written in a frenzy of poetic inspiration, speaks of winter and war, of banishment and exile, of social isolation and existential abandonment. Stepanova finds sublime imagery for the process of falling silent, interweaving love letters and travelogues, Chinese verse and Danish fairy tales into a polyphonic evocation of frozen and slowly thawing time. Following her previous book of poetry, War of the Beasts and the Animals – in part a response to the Donbas conflict – her book’s title is even more prophetic now, echoing a famous patriotic Soviet song from 1941, ‘a holy war is underway’. Born in 1972, Maria Stepanova – as poet and essayist – was a highly influential figure for many years in Moscow’s cosmopolitan literary scene until its suppression along with civil liberties and dissent under Putin’s latter-day reign of terror. Her first prose work In Memory of Memory established her internationally as one of the most important intellectual voices of contemporary Russia. Like Joseph Brodsky before her, she has mastered modern poetry’s rich repertoire of forms and moves effortlessly between the linguistic and traditional spaces of Russian, European and transatlantic literature. Her poetry, which here echoes verses by Pushkin and Lermontov, Mandelstam and Tsvetaeva, is not hermetic. She takes in the confusing signals from social networks and the media, opening herself up to the voices of kindred poets like Sylvia Plath, Inger Christensen and Anne Carson. In her prose, Stepanova searches for the essence of the moment in the maelstrom of historical time. As an essayist, she traces the reactions of her critical consciousness; taken together, her politically alert commentaries form a chronicle of the troubled present.

MPT's summer issue 'One Thousand Suns' focuses on poetry from African languages, with a selection of new translations of Senegalese poet Mama Seck Mbacke, Beninese Agnes Agboton and an interview with Equatorial Guinean Ricaredo Silebo Boturu. The African focus also includes an essay by poet and playwright Inua Ellams on translation, his Nigerian heritage and reworking The Tempest into Nigerian pidgen. We feature new translations of Hafez by UK poet Mario Petrucci and Jane Draycott's poem 'The Occupant', a response to the classic Dutch modernist text 'Awater'. Read Jan Wagner's new poems in Iain Galbraith's prizewinning translation, Hindi poet Geet Chaturvedi and Romanian Nora Iuga's surreal poetry - all in the groundbreaking magazine dedicated to poetry in translation. For the best in world poetry read MPT.

Ukraine’s remarkable aptitude for resilience and grassroots activism, as witnessed since February 2022, is closely connected to a process that began with the Euromaidan Revolution in 2013-14, when over two million Ukrainians took to the streets in defense of democracy and human rights. In the months directly following the Revolution, Russia illegally occupied Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, and began funneling both arms and troops into the eastern region of Donbas to fuel a conflict between the Ukrainian army and a small group of radical separatists. Since that time, Ukrainians have been working diligently to build the society in which they have wanted to live, all while fighting Russia and its proxies in Europe’s forgotten war. Ukrainian New Drama After the Euromaidan Revolution brings together key works from the country’s impressively generative post-Revolutionary period, many of them published here in English for the first time. As well as established voices from the European theatre repertoire such as Natalka Vorozhbyt and Maksym Kurochkin, this collection also features iconic plays from Ukraine’s post-Maidan generation of playwrights Natalka Blok, Andrii Bondarenko, Anastsiia Kosodii, Lena Lagushonkova, Olha Matsiupa, and Kateryna Penkova. Considered together, these plays reflect the diversity of voices in Ukraine as a country seeking to comprehend both the personal and political consequences of the Revolution, the war, and all that has come since. A key element to the remarkable culture of defiance and resistance that Ukrainians created in these years has been new approaches to arts activism, particularly in the performing arts. In the eight years between Euromaidan and the full-scale invasion, Ukraine witnessed an incredible boom in socially engaged performance practice. Playwriting in particular has become an essential genre through which artists have sought to bear witness to the repercussions of the war and to create spaces for the reclaiming of historical and cultural narratives; Ukrainian New Drama After the Euromaidan Revolution captures this spirit and published this necessary and vital work in English for the very first time.

MPT's Spring issue 'Songs of the Shattered Throat' focuses on poetry in the languages of India, with a selection of new translations of Tulsidas, Monika Kumar, Kutti Revathi, Joy Goswami, Vinod Kumar Shukla and Anitha Thampi, whose poem is published in partnership with Indian Quarterly. The issue also features new work by Ed Doegar, Daljit Nagra and Siddhartha Bose. The translations are accompanied by an essay by prominent Hindi novelist and poet Geet Chaturvedi about the status of Hindi as a literary language and English language's corrosive effect on Hindi literary culture. 'Songs of the Shattered Throat' also includes selections of poems by Swedish modernist Ann Jaderlund, Lea Goldberg's exquisite sequence 'Songs of Spain', published in English translation for the first time, Bernard O'Donoghue's new translation of Piers Plowman and a collaborative translation between UK poet Karen McCarthy Woolf and Turkish poet Nurduran Duman. All in this new issue of the groundbreaking magazine dedicated to poetry in translation: for the best in world poetry read MPT.

MPT's summer issue `A Blossom Shroud' focuses on poets and translators associated with this year's Shubbak festival of Arab Culture in London and it publishes a selection of new translations of poets appearing at the festival: Mona Kareem, Dunya Mikhail, and a new long sequence of poems by Golan Haji, translated by Stephen Watts. The focus also includes a conversation between Alice Guthrie, Shubbak's literary producer, and poet, translator and activist Mona Kareem, who has led the campaign to get Palestinian poet Ashraf Fayadh freed from a charge of apostasy in Saudi Arabia. Also featured are new translations of Hisham Bustani, Najwan Darwish and Syrian actor and activist Fadwa Souleiman. This stunning work from the Arab world appears alongside documentary poems by Chinese poet Shen Haobo on the AIDS villages of China, new translations of Rilke's French poetry by Paul Batchelor, poet Katrina Naomi's translations of Mexican poet Yohanna Jaramillo and Golan Haji's selection of the Kurdish poets we should all be reading. All in this new issue of the groundbreaking magazine dedicated to poetry in translation: for the best in world poetry read MPT.

MPT's summer issue Between Clay and Star focuses on Romanian poetry, with a selection of new translations of Liliana Ursu, Ana Blandiana, Gellu Naum and Dan Sociu, and a conversation between Dan Sociu and the younger Romanian poet Oana Sanziana Marian about Dan's poetry and his views on the contemporary Romanian scene: hipsters, hippies and online literary battles - The issue also features a new translation of Aime Cesaire's grand poem 'Ethiopia - ' to mark Cesaire's centenary this summer, and a section devoted to the Russian Futurist Khlebnikov, including the rarely translated 'Garden of Animals' in a new translation by Irish poet Edwin Kelly. Bonnefoy, Hugo Claus, the Uruguayan poet Laura Cesarco Eglin and the Eritrean poet Reesom Haile are also to be found in this new issue of the groundbreaking magazine dedicated to poetry in translation. For the best in world poetry read MPT.

With the death of her aunt, Maria Stepanova is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of a century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of how a seemingly ordinary Jewish family somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century. In dialogue with writers like Roland Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Susan Sontag and Osip Mandelstam, In Memory of Memory is imbued with rare intellectual curiosity and a wonderfully soft-spoken, poetic voice. Dipping into various forms - essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue and historical documents - Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities and offers an entirely new and bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.

Ukraine’s remarkable aptitude for resilience and grassroots activism, as witnessed since February 2022, is closely connected to a process that began with the Euromaidan Revolution in 2013-14, when over two million Ukrainians took to the streets in defense of democracy and human rights. In the months directly following the Revolution, Russia illegally occupied Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, and began funneling both arms and troops into the eastern region of Donbas to fuel a conflict between the Ukrainian army and a small group of radical separatists. Since that time, Ukrainians have been working diligently to build the society in which they have wanted to live, all while fighting Russia and its proxies in Europe’s forgotten war. Ukrainian New Drama After the Euromaidan Revolution brings together key works from the country’s impressively generative post-Revolutionary period, many of them published here in English for the first time. As well as established voices from the European theatre repertoire such as Natalka Vorozhbyt and Maksym Kurochkin, this collection also features iconic plays from Ukraine’s post-Maidan generation of playwrights Natalka Blok, Andrii Bondarenko, Anastsiia Kosodii, Lena Lagushonkova, Olha Matsiupa, and Kateryna Penkova. Considered together, these plays reflect the diversity of voices in Ukraine as a country seeking to comprehend both the personal and political consequences of the Revolution, the war, and all that has come since. A key element to the remarkable culture of defiance and resistance that Ukrainians created in these years has been new approaches to arts activism, particularly in the performing arts. In the eight years between Euromaidan and the full-scale invasion, Ukraine witnessed an incredible boom in socially engaged performance practice. Playwriting in particular has become an essential genre through which artists have sought to bear witness to the repercussions of the war and to create spaces for the reclaiming of historical and cultural narratives; Ukrainian New Drama After the Euromaidan Revolution captures this spirit and published this necessary and vital work in English for the very first time.

War of the Beasts and the Animals is Russian poet Maria Stepanova's first full English-language collection. Stepanova is one of Russia's most innovative and exciting poets and thinkers, and founding editor of Colta.ru, an online independent site which has been compared to Huffington Post in its status and importance. IImmensely high-profile in Russia for many years, recognition in the West has followed the publication of her documentary novel In Memory of Memory, first in German translation in 2018 and now with Sasha Dugdale's English translation - published by Fitzcarraldo in the UK and by New Directions in the US - longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021. War of the Beasts and the Animals includes her recent long poems of conflict 'Spolia' and 'War of the Beasts and Animals', written during the Donbas conflict, as well as a third long poem 'The Body Returns', commissioned by Hay International Festival in 2018 to commemorate the Centenary of the First World War. In all three long poems Stepanova's assured and experimental use of form, her modernist appropriation of poetic texts from around the world and her constant consideration of the way that culture, memory and contemporary life are interwoven make her work both pleasurable and deeply necessary. This collection also includes two sequences of poems from her 2015 collection Kireevsky: sequences of 'weird' ballads and songs, subtly changed folk and popular songs and poems which combine historical lyricism and a contemporary understanding of the effects of conflict and trauma. Stepanova uses the ready forms of ballads and songs, but alters them, so they almost appear to be refracted in moonlit water. The forms seem recognisable, but the words are oddly fragmented and suggestive, they weave together well-known refrains of songs, apparently familiar images, subtle half-nods to films and music.

In "Red House", her third collection, Sasha Dugdale evokes the ghosts and presences that flit about on the margins of our lives. She finds them at the edge of towns where superstores and allotments blur an older landscape, in Europe where emigrants leave their gods, their neighbours, their memories 'jettisoned like old clothes'; and across the chalk Downs of her native Sussex. She traces the shapes that they leave through folk song, lament and lyric poetry. Haunted by history, confronted by primal brutalities, the poems in "Red House" proclaim the fierce, bright authenticity that is 'all the proof we need that we're alive'.

'I spend the night in an officer's barracks, where no woman has ever set foot.' In the darkest recesses of Ukraine, a war is raging. A journalist takes a research trip to the front line. Teenage girls wait for soldiers on benches. A medic mourns her lover killed in action. Natal'ya Vorozhbit's play Bad Roads is a heartbreaking, powerful and bitterly comic account of what it is to be a woman in wartime. It was premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, in November 2017, in a production directed by Vicky Featherstone. It was developed by the Royal Court International Department, and translated by Sasha Dugdale. Natal'ya Vorozhbit is the leading Ukrainian playwright of her generation and has worked with the Royal Court since 2004. Her work includes The Khomenko Family Chronicles, Maidan Diaries (Royal Court) and The Grain Store (RSC).

Centres of Cataclysm celebrates the fifty-year history of Modern Poetry in Translation, one of the world's most innovative and exciting poetry magazines. Founded in 1965 by Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort, MPT has constantly introduced courageous and revolutionary poets of the 20th and 21st century to English-speaking readers. Ted Hughes thought of MPT as an 'airport for incoming translations' - from the whole world, across frontiers of space and time. These are poems we cannot do without. The anthology is not arranged chronologically but, from a variety of perspectives, it addresses half a century of war, oppression, revolution, hope and survival. In so doing, it truthfully says and vigorously defends the human. In among the poems are illuminating letters, essays and notes on the poets, on the world in which they lived and on the enterprise of translating them.

Shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Poetry Prize 2021. Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2020. Deformations includes two large-scale works related in their preoccupation with biographical and mythical narrative. 'Welfare Handbook' explores the life and art of Eric Gill, the well-known English letter cutter, sculptor and cultural figure, who is known to have sexually abused his daughters. The poem draws on material from Gill's letters, diaries, notes and essays as part of a lyrical exploration of the conjunction between aesthetics, subjectivity and violence. 'Pitysad' is a series of simultaneously occurring fragments composed around themes and characters from Homer's Odyssey. It considers how trauma is disguised and deformed through myth and art. Acting as a bridge between these two works is a series of individual poems on the creation and destruction of cultural and mythical conventions.

'The Constellation' is the special 'Poetry International Festival' issue of Modern Poetry in Translation. The magazine focusses on the powerful and moving exchange of poems and letters between Bertolt Brecht and his lover and collaborator Margarete Steffin as they went through exile, war and loss. These new translations are by acclaimed translator and poet David Constantine. The issue also features new poems by Christine Marendon and Nikola Madzirov who are both appearing at the Poetry International Festival at London's Southbank Centre, and responses to Rilke's poetry by Patrick McGuiness, Sujata Bhatt and Durs Grunbein. Raw new poems from Iran, poetry from China, Somalia and Turkey and translations by John Berger of his son Yves Berger's French poetry are just a few of the many highlights.

Sasha Dugdale's poems explore the mysterious solitudes of individual lives with tender, unsparing lucidity. The book opens with a sequence written at the Pushkin family estate. The great Russian poet, setting out to St Petersburg, turns back when a hare runs in front of his horse: the superstitious act saves his life. Such chance or fated moments where paths cross are at the heart of the collection. A boy on a train, passing a gold chain through his fingers, sparks a buried childhood memory in a watching passenger; lovers reach out to touch in the dark, while, a dying soldier holds to the sight of house martins swooping over a pool. In fragmentary meetings, Dugdale finds a source of hope and art.

Elena Shvarts was the most outstanding Russian poet of her generation. Birdsong on the Seabed presents a selection of her later poetry. Shvarts brought out four new collections in Russian after the publication by Bloodaxe in 1993 of 'Paradise': Selected Poems, the first English edition of her poetry and also a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation. This second bilingual Russian-English selection of her work also includes some poems unpublished in Russia at the time. Sasha Dugdale's translation of Birdsong on the Seabed was shortlisted for both the Rossica Translation Prize and the Corneliu M. Popescu Award for European Poetry in Translation. Elena Shvarts stood outside all schools and movements in contemporary Russian poetry. She once famously described poetry as a 'dance without legs'. Her own poetry fits this description perfectly, a combination of deeply rhythmic and lyrical dance with the eccentric, perpetual movement of flight. The world of her poems is strange and grotesque; often the setting is urban, but unrecognisable - towns emptied of the everyday and peopled only by animals, spirits and strange elemental forces. A peculiar religious fervour illuminates these scenes, but her religion is unorthodox and highly individual. Shvarts' poetry is visionary. Her vision takes her to the edge of language and rhythm, and she was one of the few contemporary poets brave enough to trust her vision absolutely. Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation

MPT's new look Spring issue Strange Tracks focuses on Dutch poetry, with a selection of new poems by three of the Netherlands most exciting poets: Toon Tellegen, Ester Naomi Perquin and Menno Wigman and an interview with Tellegen and his English translator Judith Wilkinson about their prize-winning collaboration Raptors. The issue also features poems from around the world: Zhang Zao, Luis Felipe Fabre's poems about the drug wars in Mexico, Argentinian poet Fabian Casas and French poet Valerie Rouzeau. There are also new translations of Baudelaire by Australian poet Jan Owen and some fresh new versions of poems and riddles from The Exeter Book. We're also launching a new design for MPT and some commissioned cover artwork. For the best in world poetry read MPT.

Presenting stories which represent each layer of the city of Moscow, from the centre of power to the outer rings of desolate estates and tumbledown shacks, this fascinating collection offers a lively and varied portrait in fiction of Russia's mysterious capital city. The collection includes works by Russian authors ranging from Anton Chekhov and Yuri Koval to Larisa Miller and Marina Boroditskaia, collating nineteeth- and twentieth-century tales, as well those written by contemporary authors. The stories are intriguingly varied -an account of life in the city's infamous high security prison, a tale of a lady with a supernatural gift for repairing household devices, the story of another pitiful lost dog who nearly joins the Moscow Circus - and together they shed light on the changing nature of Moscow society across the centuries. The next instalment in a series of successful translated anthologies of stories set in and around a particular European City. Moscow Tales combines two genres, travel writing and literary fiction and provides an insight into the lives of those who live in Moscow or have written about it.

Winner of the 2017 Poetry Book Society Winter Choice Award. Contains the poem 'Joy' - Winner of the 2016 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. Sasha Dugdale's fourth Carcanet collection, Joy, features the poem of that title which received the 2016 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. `Joy' is a monologue in the voice of William Blake's wife Catherine, exploring the creative partnership between the artist and his wife, and the nature of female creativity. The Forward judges called it `an extraordinarily sustained visionary piece of writing'. The poems in Joy mark a new departure for Dugdale, who expresses in poetry a hitherto `silent' dialogue which she began as an editor of Modern Poetry in Translation with writers such as Don Mee Choi, Kim Hyesoon, Maria Stepanova and Svetlana Alexeivich. Dugdale combines an open interest in the historical fate of women and in the treacherous fictional shaping of history. In the abundant, complex and not always easy range of voices in Joy she attempts to redress the linear nature of remembrance and history and restore the `maligned and misaligned'.

With the death of her aunt, the narrator is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of a century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of how a seemingly ordinary Jewish family somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century. In dialogue with writers like Roland Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, and Osip Mandelstam, In Memory of Memory is imbued with rare intellectual curiosity and a wonderfully soft-spoken, poetic voice. Dipping into various forms-essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue, and historical documents-Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities and offers an entirely new and bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.

A tough but tender portrait of urban squalor, from the award-winning Siberian-born author of Plasticine. Dima, 19, lives with his alcoholic father. The night before he leaves for the war in Chechnya to do his national service, he throws a party. Lera, 20, lives in the same block. She's convinced that she'll win a fortune if only she can borrow enough money for a lottery ticket. Lera's cousin Yulka, 18, is more interested in seeing just how far Dima will go to prove his devotion to her. Vassily Sigarev's play Ladybird was first performed in this English translation by Sasha Dugdale at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 2004.

MPT's summer 2015 issue 'I WISH' focuses on world poetry for children, with new translations of modern and classic children's poems from Taiwan, Russia, Poland, Eritrea, Mexico and Holland, including Julian Tuwim and Toon Tellegen. Tellegen's work is printed alongside the original artwork by Ingrid Godon. We also feature a selection of four Burmese women poets, curated by Pandora and translated by UK-based poets Kim Moore, Carola Luther, Stephanie Norgate and Olivia McCannon. Other highlights include a tribute to Gunter Grass, D.M. Black's new Dante translation, Syrian poet Nazih Abu Afash's 'diary' of war and Anzhelina Polonskaya - all in this new issue of the ground-breaking magazine dedicated to poetry in translation: for the best in world poetry read MPT.

The Best British Poetry 2012 presents the finest and most engaging poems found in literary magazines and webzines over the past year. The material gathered represents the rich variety of current UK poetry. Each poem is accompanied by a note by the poet explaining the inspiration for the poem. An indispensable guide to British poetry and a must-have purchase for anyone interested in the art, from newcomers to the most experienced professional and all creative writing students working in English.