Author: Marina Tsvetaeva

Elaine Feinstein was educated at Newnham College, 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 Award 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). Anna of all the Russias: The Life of Anna Akhmatova was published in 2005. Elaine Feinstein”s Collected Poems and Translations (2002) was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. Her evocation of Stalin”s Russia, The Russian Jerusalem, was published by Carcanet Press in 2008. She served on the Council of the Royal Society of Literature, of which she was a Fellow, as a judge for most of the current literary prizes, and as Chair of the Judges for the T.S. Eliot Award. She received a Civil List Pension in 2010. She died in September 2019.