Elena Marinicheva

Community Fellow
Elena Marinicheva

Elena Marinicheva

Community Fellow, September 2022 - January 2023; May - October 2023)

Elena Marinicheva is a literary translator, essayist and critic. She is the most widely known translator of contemporary Ukrainian prose into Russian. Her translation work includes many writings of leading Ukrainian authors, among whom are Oksana Zabuzhko, Serhiy Zhadan, Maria Matios, Evegenia Kononenko, Tanya Malyarchuk, Pavlo Volvach, Kost’ Moskalyets, Taras Prokhasko and others. Elena was born in Ukraine, in the city of Zaporizhia (then part of the USSR). After finishing high school, she moved to Moscow to study at Moscow State University, and graduated from the Department of Journalism with a major in literary critics. Elena worked for some of the leading Moscow publications: Literaturnoye Obozreniye, Noviy Mir, Novaya Gazeta, Druzhba Narodov, Novaya Yunost and The New Times. She authored many articles in Russian media about modern Ukrainian culture and literature. The most important books translated by her are Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex and Museum of Abandoned Secrets by Oksana Zabuzhko, Internat by Serhiy Zhadan, and Nation by Maria Matios. Elena received the “Noviy Mir” prestigious award for her articles on Ukrainian literature and translation of Zabuzhko’s novels, and the Nora Gal prize for her recent years' translations from Ukrainian. She is a member of PEN Ukraine and Masters of Literary Translation Guild (Moscow). She used to be a frequent participant of Publishers’ Forum in Lviv.

Project title: Translating works by Ukrainian authors

Elena is planning to review Ukrainian fiction published in the period 2014-2022, and prepare a collection of translations into Russian of several works from this period that reflect the atmosphere of growing threat of war. She will also find, select and translate diaries of Ukrainian writers, of the period from 24 February 2022 to the present. Sources for this will be social networks, private communications and current media.