Elaine
Feinstein was educated at
Newnham College, University of Cambridge. She has worked as a
university lecturer, a subeditor, and a freelance journalist.
Since 1980, when she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of
Literature, she has lived as a full-time writer. In 1990, she
received a Cholmondeley for Poetry, and was given an Honorary
D.Litt from the University of Leicester. Her versions of the
poems of Marina Tsvetaeva – for which she received three
translation awards from the Arts Council – were first
published in 1971. She has written fourteen novels, many radio
plays, television dramas, and five biographies, including A
Captive Lion: the Life of Marina Tsvetaeva (1987) and
Pushkin (1998). Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet
(2001), was shortlisted for the biennial Marsh Biography
Prize. Her biography of Anna Akhmatova, Anna of all the
Russias, was published in 2005. Elaine Feinstein has
travelled extensively, not only to read her work at festivals
across the world, but to be Writer in Residence for the
British Council, first in Singapore, and then in Tromsø,
Norway. She was a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at Bellagio in
1998. Her poems have been widely anthologised. Her
Collected Poems and Translations (2002) was a Poetry
Book Society Special Commendation. She has served as a judge
for the Gregory Awards, the Independent Foreign Fiction Award,
the Costa Poetry Prize and the Rossica Award for Literature
translated from Russian, and in 1995 was chairman of the
judges for the T.S. Eliot
Prize. Her most recent novel is The Russian Jerusalem. A much extended selection of Maria Tsvetaeva's poems, Bride of Ice, will be published by Carcanet in June 2009.
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