Repair Work translated by Sasha Dugdale Maria Stepanova In October 2023 Maria Stepanova won the Berman Literature Prize for In Memory of Memory (Fitzcarraldo Editions). This is her acceptance speech, translated from the Russian by Sasha Dugdale.

Dear Friends,

The book we are speaking of today was written only recently, and yet it was written in a different historical era – before the pandemic, when for a few years the whole world lived in a constant present tense: without the future, which had been put off indefinitely, and without the past, which seemed beyond reach. It was published before the beginning of a full-scale war of aggression in Europe, a war that was started and is still being waged by the country I was born in, and where I had spent my whole life. It is a war which has forever changed my sense of self and of my occupation. And that is why it is so hard for me to speak now. In Memory of Memory appeared in a different world and in some ways was written by a different person. ... read more

James K. Baxter James K. Baxter wrote in the introduction to his selected poems, The Rock Woman (1969), of ‘an obsessive industry that led [him] as often as not into the cactus’. The poems that follow are from A Branch Torn Down, a forthcoming selection – the fourth such – of work unpublished and uncollected in Baxter’s lifetime, work that doesn’t always avoid the cactus, but does attest to the deep involvement in the human condition of New Zealand’s most talented, prolific and controversial poet, ‘a passionate, complex and haunted man’ who was also, in John Weir’s view, ‘one of the great English-language poets of the twentieth century’.


A Portrait of a Fellow-Alcoholic

My cobber has the shakes. The whitish-red
Eyes glitter in the punchbag of his head –
‘That bugger Reilly never had the right
To bash me when I bent under the bed

To get my fiddle...’ The ice-black urinal
In which he lay till dawn, more dead than tight,
Has fouled his jersey. In the trim lounge bar
I shout him three good whiskies for the trip
... read more

Stav Poleg First you were an idea, a blue satellite
orbiting a distant, dark

moon. Then you were a feather, the light
distance it takes for beauty

to form into something like finding
the ground. It didn’t happen

without warning, the morning
glowed like a feverish neon sign – an indication

of clemency – I thought, the sky
turned sapphire and dark like new foreign
... read more