Sasha Dugdale

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  FRSL
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

Biography

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] She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2020.^[9]

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."^[10]

Publications

Poetry

• (2024), The Strongbox, Carcanet Press, ISBN 9781800174085
• (2020), Deformations, Carcanet Press, ISBN 9781784108984
• (2017), Joy, Carcanet Press, ISBN 9781784105037
• (2011), Red House, Oxford Poets, ISBN 9781906188023
• (2007), The Estate, Oxford Poets, ISBN 9781903039809
• (2003), Notebook, Oxford Poets, ISBN 9781903039670

Translations

• (2024), Maria Stepanova, Holy Winter 20/21, Bloodaxe, ISBN 9781780376950
• (2021), Maria Stepanova, The War of the Beasts and the Animals, Bloodaxe, ISBN 9781780375342
• (2021), Maria Stepanova, In Memory of Memory, Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK), ISBN 9781913097530, New Directions (US), ISBN 9780811228831
• (2017), Natalya Vorozhbyt, Bad Roads, Nick Hern Books, ISBN 9781848427143
• (2009), Natalya Vorozhbyt, The Grainstore, Nick Hern Books, ISBN 9781848420458
• (2008), Elena Shvarts, Birdsong on the Seabed, Bloodaxe, ISBN 9781852247836
• (2004), Vasily Sigarev, Ladybird, Nick Hern Books
• (2004), Tatiana Shcherbina, Life Without: Selected Poetry & Prose 1992-2003, Bloodaxe, ISBN 9781852246426
• (2003), The Presnyakov Brothers, Terrorism, Nick Hern Books
• (2003), The Presnyakov Brothers, Playing the Victim, Nick Hern Books, ISBN 9781854597595
• (2003), Vasily Sigarev, Black Milk, Nick Hern Books
• (2002), Vasily Sigarev, Plasticine, Nick Hern Books, ISBN 9781854596901

Awards

• — (2025), Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award, The Strongbox
• — (2022), Lois Roth Award, In Memory of Memory^[11]
• — (2020), T. S. Eliot Prize, Deformations, (shortlist)
• — (2017), Cholmondeley Award^[12]
• — (2017), Poetry Book Society Choice - Joy
• — (2016), Forward Poetry Prize for Best Single Poem, Joy^[1]
• — (2003), Eric Gregory Award