The first Russian stand at BookExpo America New York, 25 - 27 May 2010 This year the BOOKS FROM RUSSIA stand took part in BookExpo America, the main fair in the American book industry. The stand was organised by the Russian Federal agency for Press and Mass Communications and represented a range of Russian publishers. BookExpo America is currently undergoing major changes, transforming itself from a fair which focused primarily on the domestic market into an international book forum.

3rd RUSSIAN FILM FESTIVAL 30 October – 8 November 2009 Apollo Piccadilly, London T: 0871 220 6000 Academia Rossica is proud to present 10 UK premieres of award-winning Russian films produced in. All films with English subtitles. Programme director: Andrey Plakhov, President of FIPRESCI. The festival opens on 30 October with a new adaptation of Anna Karenina by one of Russia’s most defiant film directors, Sergei Soloviev. The film took 14 years to make and it is part of Soloviev’s trilogy ASSA (1987) – ASSA-2 (2009) – Anna Karenina (2009). Full programme of the Festival:

In order to prepare Russia’s participation as Market Focus Country two steering committees have been set up - in London and in Moscow. The first London steering committee was held at the Russian Embassy in London on 9 November 2009. It was chaired by Mr Alistair Burtenshaw, Director of The London Book Fair.

Мартин Дьюхерст читает лекции по русскому языку и литературе в университете Глазго с 1964 года. Основной его интерес лежит в области русской литературы 20 века. Мартин составил множество библиографий The Year's Work для Modern Language Studies.

19-21 June
London Review Bookshop
One of our aims has been to place the translator centre stage (the programme features works translated from Arabic, Chinese, Croatian, French and Russian) and we are fortunate that this year’s winning translator of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, Anne McLean, is taking part in the panel discussion with three other eminent translators: her English language edition of Evelio Rosero’s The Armies was launched at the bookshop last October.

When Academia Rossica approached me to serve on the jury for their translation prize, I was excited and intrigued. What would the field be like, how many entries would there be, were there still publishers around in the West willing to produce translations of serious Russian works? The classics apart, was there more to Russian literature for English-speaking people than penguins and historical detectives? My caricature of the average Western reader's view of Russian literature today can perhaps be excused in part by my own education.

3rd RUSSIAN FILM FESTIVAL 30 October – 8 November 2009 Apollo Piccadilly, London T: 0871 220 6000 Academia Rossica is proud to present 10 UK premieres of award-winning Russian films produced in. All films with English subtitles. Programme director: Andrey Plakhov, President of FIPRESCI. The festival opens on 30 October with a new adaptation of Anna Karenina by one of Russia’s most defiant film directors, Sergei Soloviev. The film took 14 years to make and it is part of Soloviev’s trilogy ASSA (1987) – ASSA-2 (2009) – Anna Karenina (2009). Full programme of the Festival:

The first day ended with an evening with Dmitry Bykov and Bridget Kendall at Waterstone’s, Piccadilly. Bykov entertained the large audience with, along with everything else, a joke. It went like this: “At birth you get a label put on your arm, after death, it’s put on your foot. If someone gets the same number both times, they win a prize – a pressure cooker.”

Александр Терехов родился в 1966 году, по профессии журналист, Выпускник факультета журналистики МГУ, работал в журнале «Огонек», затем в газете «Совершенно секретно», был зам. гл. редактора журнала “Люди” затем гл. редактор газеты “Настоящее время”. Последние годы занимается бизнесом. Как прозаик начал печататься в альманахе "Апрель" и в журнале "Знамя" (романы «Зимний день начала новой жизни», и «Крысобой».) Терехов - автор нескольких книг рассказов и повестей, а также трех романов.

Aleksandr Mikhailovich Terekhov was born in June 1966 in the provincial town of Tula in Central Russia. After serving in the army he graduated in journalism from the Moscow State University. He soon won acclaim as a writer with his stories about his army experiences and about the early perestroika chaos he was witnessing.

Mikhail Shishkin was born in 1961 and grew up in Moscow. He studied at the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute where he trained as a teacher. Following his graduation in 1982, Shishkin worked as a journalist at ‘Rovesnik’ and then, between 1985 and 1995, as a teacher of English and German. In 1995 he moved to Switzerland and he lives in Zurich to this day. Buoyed by Shishkin’s sophisticated language and phrases of unique melody, predictable comparisons have been made to that other writer of extraordinary linguistic versatility, Vladimir Nabokov. Though he understands himself as within a tradition of Russian writers in exile, for Shishkin, the question ‘to return or not to return to Russia’ simply does not exist. He asserts that ‘for a better understanding of the self one should live everywhere’.

In the three years since his first book was published, Oleg Zaionchkovsky (b. 1959) has gained the widespread admiration of critics and readers alike, a fact which appears to have taken the author himself by surprise. Until his recent move to Moscow, Zaionchkovsky had spent his entire adult life in the small town of Khotkovo, outside the capital, where he met his future wife at school at the age of thirteen, and where he worked as a metal worker and electrical engineer before trying his hand at prose at his wife's insistence. The result was Sergeev and the Little Town (Sergeev i gorodok, 2005), a book of short stories describing small-town byt (daily life). Marketed by its publishers, OGI, as a novel, it was immediately short-listed for the Russian Booker Prize. Petrovich came out that same year. Taking the reader through Petrovich's childhood and adolescence, it prompts comparison with other treatments of early life in the Russian literary tradition (by Lev Tolstoy, Sergei Aksakov and others).

Aleksandr Mikhailovich Terekhov was born in June 1966 in the provincial town of Tula in Central Russia. After serving in the army he graduated in journalism from the Moscow State University. He soon won acclaim as a writer with his stories about his army experiences and about the early perestroika chaos he was witnessing.

Mikhail Shishkin was born in 1961 and grew up in Moscow. He studied at the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute where he trained as a teacher. Following his graduation in 1982, Shishkin worked as a journalist at ‘Rovesnik’ and then, between 1985 and 1995, as a teacher of English and German. In 1995 he moved to Switzerland and he lives in Zurich to this day. Buoyed by Shishkin’s sophisticated language and phrases of unique melody, predictable comparisons have been made to that other writer of extraordinary linguistic versatility, Vladimir Nabokov. Though he understands himself as within a tradition of Russian writers in exile, for Shishkin, the question ‘to return or not to return to Russia’ simply does not exist. He asserts that ‘for a better understanding of the self one should live everywhere’.

by Aleksandr Skidan
Genya Turovskaya with Eugene Ostashevsky, Evgeny Pavlov, Jacob Edmond & Natasha Randall
Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008, pp.143
Aleksandr Skidan is one of Russia's most important contemporary poets. With language that is at once literary, cinematic, philosophical, journalistic, his innovative writing calls into question the distinction between poetry and philosophy.

by Ivan Bunin
Translated by Hugh Aplin
One World Classics, 2008, pp. 324
One of the great achievements of twentieth-century Russian émigré literature, Dark Avenues - the culmination of a life's work of unrelenting challenge to Soviet dogma - took Bunin's poetic mastery of language to new heights.

by Elena Shvarts
Translated by Sasha Dugdale
Bloodaxe Books; 2008; pp. 167
This new bilingual Russian-English selection also includes some poems not yet been published in Russia. Elena Shvarts stands outside all schools and movements in contemporary Russian poetry. She once famously described poetry as a 'dance without legs'. Her own poetry fits this description perfectly, a combination of deeply rhythmic and lyrical dance with the eccentric, perpetual movement of flight.

Robert Porter taught Russian Language and Literature at the University of Bristol for 25 years, eventually being promoted to a Personal Chair there. From 1999 until 2005 he was Professor of Slavonic Studies at the University of Glasgow. His monographs on Russian Literature include Four Contemporary Russian Writers (1989) and Russia's Alternative Prose (1994).

Martin Dewhirst has lectured on Russian language and literature at the University of Glasgow since 1964. He is particularly interested in twentieth century Russian literature and has compiled many bibliographies on the subject for The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies. He has worked periodically on the Samizdat staff of Radio Liberty in Munich and is also a specialist on Soviet censorship and archives.

Norman Stone has been described as ‘a legendary teacher’ when he was professor of modern history at Oxford University. Always controversial and never dull, his outspoken views on many aspects of European and Russian history are always thought-provoking and guaranteed to stimulate fierce debate. He is the prize-winning author of books on the First World War and Hitler. He was professor of modern history at Oxford from 1984 to 1995, from where he moved to take up the post of director of the Russian-Turkish Centre at Bilkent University, Ankara. For the last ten years he has divided his time between Oxford and Turkey, and he believes that living abroad there has given him a new perspective on Europe, and particularly on Russia, about which he has said, ‘When you realise that Tatar-Turkey dimension, you understand the thing an awful lot better.’ It is a privilege to have Professor Norman Stone as a guest at our Russian Language and Literature Week and audiences will not fail to be stimulated by his erudition and originality of thought.

Founding Director of Academia Rossica, editor of ROSSICA journal
Academia Rossica is the organiser of Russian Language and Literature Week in Britain. The organisation seeks to present the best of Russian culture to the international audience in order to strengthen cultural and intellectual links between Russia and other countries.

19-20 April
Apollo Cinema, Piccadilly
Screenings of films based on Russian literature
With English subtitles

14-16 April
London Book Fair, Earls Court, London
The first ever Russian stand at the London Book Fair will present books and publishing programmes of 20 leading publishers from St Petersburg and Moscow as well as a continuous 3-day programme of debates on contemporary Russian culture, politics and the future of Russo-British relations.

Founding Director of Academia Rossica, editor of ROSSICA journal
Academia Rossica is the organiser of Russian Language and Literature Week in Britain. The organisation seeks to present the best of Russian culture to the international audience in order to strengthen cultural and intellectual links between Russia and other countries.

The Ties of Blood
Russian Literature from the 21st Century
This edition of Rossica takes on a new form! It is an Anthology of New Russian Writing, featuring both prose and poetry translated into English and edited by leading specialists.
The issue was launched at the first Russian Literature Week, in April 2008.