Sasha Dugdale | |
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Born | 1974 (age 50–51) Sussex, England |
Occupation | Poet, playwright, translator |
Notable works | Joy Deformations |
Notable awards | Forward Prize Cholmondeley Award Lois Roth Award Runciman Award |
Sasha Dugdale FRSL is a British poet, playwright, editor and translator. She has written six poetry collections and is a translator of Russian literature.
Sasha Dugdale was born in 1974 [1] in Sussex. [2]
Dugdale has published six poetry collections with Carcanet Press: Notebook (2003), The Estate (2007), Red House (2011), Joy (2017), Deformations (2020) and The Strongbox (2024). She won the 2016 Forward Poetry Prize for Best Single Poem, entitled Joy; a Cholmondeley Award in 2017; [2] and the Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award 2025 for The Strongbox. [3]
Dugdale specialises in translating contemporary Russian women poets and post-Soviet new writing for theatre. She has worked both in the United Kingdom and the United States on a number of productions, translating modern Russian plays. [4] She won English PEN Translates Awards for her translations of collections of poetry by the Russian poet Maria Stepanova. [5]
From 2012 to 2017 Dugdale was the editor of Modern Poetry in Translation , publishing sixteen issues of the magazine as well as its fiftieth anniversary anthology Centres of Cataclysm (Bloodaxe, 2016). From 2015 to 2021 Dugdale directed the biennial Winchester Poetry Festival. [6] Dugdale was poet-in-residence at St John's College, Cambridge between 2018 and 2021.
Dugdale's poetry has been featured in the Guardian [7] and her translation of Maria Stepanova's novel In Memory of Memory was shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize, the 2022 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the 2022 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and in 2021 was longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature. [8]
Dugdale won the MLA Lois Roth Award for her translation, the judges’ citation noted that: "Sasha Dugdale's translation is a living text, the work of a poet, as attuned to the modernist voices of Mandelstam and Akhmatova as to those of Sebald and Barthes, flowing with admirable rhythm and a stunning breadth of vocabulary. In Dugdale's hands, sentence after sentence is quotable, the shadows of the irretrievable past rippling through a complex, many-layered landscape." [9]