Maria Galina
Maria Galina is a poet, novelist, translator, and critic. She was born in Tver, but spent her childhood in Odessa. She has a degree in marine biology. Her first publication was in Yunost (Youth) in 1991. In 2000-2001, she was a regular columnist for Literatunaya Gazeta (Literary Newspaper). She is currently a chief editor of Drugaya Storona (The Other Side), a non-commercial literature project, and a columnist for the magazine Znamya (Banner). Galina is the recipient of numerous literary awards, including the Novyi Mir (New World) Prize in 2005 and the prestigious Moskovski Schyot (The Moscow Tally) in 2006. Her work has been translated into Polish and English. Dmitry Kuzmin writes: "Maria Galina's poetry is distinguished by its range, from Church Slavonic to the terminology of science, with an intermixture of Yiddish and Ukrainian. She recreates the unique and virtually lost social dialect of the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia of Ukraine, the only example of this in modern Russian poetry."