War of the Beasts and the Animals

Poetry Book Society Translation Choice

'2021 is the year of Stepanova' - Matthew Janney, The Guardian

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 independent cultural, social and political website which has been compared to Huffington Post in its status and importance. Immensely high-profile in Russia for many years, recognition in the West has followed the publication of Maria Stepanova's documentary novel In Memory of Memory, first in German translation in 2018 and now with Sasha Dugdale's English translation - published by Fitzcarraldo - shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize.

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.

‘… the collection couldn’t be more prescient in the urgency with which it speaks to this particular moment… a tour de force introduction to Maria Stepanova’s urgently political poetry.’ - Dzifa Benson, Modern Poetry in Translation

Maria Stepanova is a poet, novelist, essayist, journalist and the author of ten poetry collections and three books of essays. Sasha Dugdale's translation of her book-length poem Holy Winter 20/21 was published by Bloodaxe in the UK and Ireland in 2024. Her earlier book War of the Beasts and the Animals (Bloodaxe Books, 2021), also translated by Sasha Dugdale, was the first English translation of her poetry. Both Holy Winter 20/21 and War of the Beasts and the Animals were Poetry Book Society Translation Choices and winners of PEN Translates awards, and War of the Beasts and the Animals was also shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2021. Maria Stepanova's documentary novel In Memory of Memory won Russia's Big Book Award in 2018 and was published in English in Sasha Dugdale's translation by Fitzcarraldo in the UK and New Directions in the US in 2021. In 2023 she was awarded the Berman Literature Prize for In Memory of Memory. It was also shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize, the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2021, and the 2022 James Tait Black Prize for Biography. A third book by her, The Voice Over: Poems and Essays, edited by Irina Shevelenko, was published by Columbia University Press in the US in its Russian Library series in 2021.

Maria Stepanova has received several Russian and international literary awards (including the prestigious Andrey Bely Prize and Joseph Brodsky Fellowship). In 2022 she was awarded the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding 2023 for another book of poetry, Mädchen ohne Kleider (Girls Without Clothes), published in German by Suhrkamp Verlag. She founded and was editor-in-chief of the online independent crowd-sourced journal Colta.ru, which engaged with the cultural, social and political reality of contemporary Russia until the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine when all dissenting media in Russia were forced to shut down. As a prominent critic of Putin’s regime, she had to leave Russia and is now living in exile.

Sasha Dugdale was editor of Modern Poetry in Translation from 2013 to 2017, and is co-editor of the anthology Centres of Cataclysm: Celebrating Fifty Years of Modern Poetry in Translation (Bloodaxe Books/MPT, 2016). She has translated many works of Russian poetry, prose and drama, including Tatiana Shcherbina's Life Without: Selected Poetry & Prose 1992-2003 (Bloodaxe Books, 2004), Elena Shvarts’s Birdsong on the Seabed (Bloodaxe Books, 2008), Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (BBC Radio 3, 2008), and the short story collection Moscow Tales (Oxford University Press, 2013), and has published five poetry collections with Oxford/Carcanet, The Estate (2007), Notebook (2003), Red House (2011), Joy (2017), and Deformations (2020), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her translation of Elena Shvarts' Birdsong on the Seabed was shortlisted for both the Rossica Translation Prize and the Corneliu M. Popescu Award for European Poetry in Translation. She won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2016, and received a Cholmondeley Award in 2017.