Margarita Maratovna Meklina

Margarita Maratovna Meklina (Russian: Маргари́та Мара́товна Ме́клина; born on 15 July 1975 in Leningrad) is a short story writer and novelist.

Margarita Meklina was born in Leningrad and now resides in Ireland and in the U.S. An author of ten books and a recipient of literary prizes in Russia, she has published widely in English and was named “the winner of the month” by Unmanned Press in San Francisco for her novella “Multiple Children.” She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize by The Conium Review

She is widely recognized as a ground breaking writer from her cutting prose, which helped redefine Russian literature in the 1990s as it emerged from decades under the Soviet shadow. Her stories at that time, often built around themes of marginalized sexuality, combined with postmodernist and New Sincerity-like elements, created a new Russian lexicon in that genre. Some of them were translated into English, Italian, Spanish, French, Swedish and Japanese. In the past half decade she received recognition of that oeuvre, and for her subsequent work in fiction, with two major Russian literature prizes. Her collection of short stories, The Battle at St. Petersburg (Moscow, 2003,) received the prestigious Andrei Bely Prize in 2003, when she was the youngest recipient of the prize up to that date. The queer-themed volume of fiction, Love Has Four Hands (Moscow, 2008), and the volume, My Criminal Connection to Art, received the Russian Prize in 2009. Her creative collaboration with fellow Bely Prize-winner Arkadii Dragomoshchenko resulted in an animated collection of epistolary exchanges between them, published as POP3.

A devotee of conceptual art, Meklina shifted from post-modernism a lá Marina Abramović where she wrote as she lived and lived as she wrote, to a more sellable style in which active verbs, clarity and simplicity replaced "long-winded sentences, clatter of stones and nouns and overall foggy landscapes," in her words.

Much of Meklina's fiction in English explores diverse topics that circulate loosely around memory, creative collaboration and the bifurcated experience of the culturally displaced and reinvented. Her young adult novel, The Little Gaucho Who Loved Don Quixote, was a semi-finalist for a 2013 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award.

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Wikipedia