Disappearing Act

Maria Stepanova is a poet, essayist, journalist and the author of ten poetry collections and three books of essays. In Memory of Memory won Russia’s Bolshaya Kniga Award in 2018. Sasha Dugdale's English translation was awarded the Berman Literature Prize and was also shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation and the James Tait Black Prize for Biography. She founded and was editor-in-chief of the online independent crowd-sourced journal Colta.ru. As a prominent critic of Putin’s regime, she had to leave Russia and is now living in exile.

‘Essential… Written with deep insight, despair and an intrinsic sense of the alarming recurrence of the present’s failure to learn lessons from the past. The Disappearing Act, expertly translated by Sasha Dugdale, is the dreamlike testimony of a novelist, known simply as M, who is witnessing from exile her country of origin’s invasion of a separate sovereign state. Creatively and psychologically paralysed by the horrors of war seen at a distance, M can no longer write; every innocuous image becomes superimposed with horror, and so she retreats into self-erasure and memory in order to survive, never mind evolve.’— Catherine Taylor, Irish Times