Sasha Dugdale | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1974 (age 50–51) Sussex,England |
| Occupation | Poet, playwright, translator |
| Notable works | Joy Deformations |
| Notable awards | Forward Prize Cholmondeley Award Lois Roth Award |
Sasha DugdaleFRSL is a British poet, playwright, editor and translator. She has written six poetry collections and is a translator ofRussian literature.
Sasha Dugdale was born in 1974[1] inSussex.[2]
Dugdale has published six poetry collections withCarcanet Press:Notebook (2003),The Estate (2007),Red House (2011),Joy (2017),Deformations (2020) andThe Strongbox (2024). She won the 2016Forward Poetry Prize for Best Single Poem, entitledJoy, and aCholmondeley Award in 2017.[2]
Dugdale specialises in translating contemporaryRussian women poets and post-Soviet new writing for theatre. She has worked both in theUnited Kingdom and theUnited States on a number of productions, translating modernRussian plays.[3] She wonEnglish PEN Translates Awards for her translations of collections of poetry by the Russian poetMaria Stepanova.[4]
From 2012 to 2017 Dugdale was the editor ofModern Poetry in Translation, publishing sixteen issues of the magazine as well as its fiftieth year anniversary anthologyCentres of Cataclysm (Bloodaxe, 2016). From 2015 to 2021 Dugdale directed the biennial Winchester Poetry Festival.[5] Dugdale was poet-in-residence at St John’s College, Cambridge between 2018 and 2021.
Dugdale's poetry has been featured in theGuardian[6] and her translation of Maria Stepanova's novelIn Memory of Memory was shortlisted for the 2021International Booker Prize, the 2022Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the 2022James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and in 2021 was longlisted for theNational Book Award for Translated Literature.[7]
Dugdale won the MLA Lois Roth Award for her translation, the judges’ citation noted that:"Sasha Dugdale’s translation is a living text, the work of a poet, as attuned to the modernist voices of Mandelstam and Akhmatova as to those of Sebald and Barthes, flowing with admirable rhythm and a stunning breadth of vocabulary. In Dugdale’s hands, sentence after sentence is quotable, the shadows of the irretrievable past rippling through a complex, many-layered landscape."[8]
