Poetry. Winner of Three Percent's 2010 Best Translated Book Award for Poetry. Translated from the Russian by Stephanie Sandler and Genya Turovskaya. Elena Fanailova's poems take on topics ranging from the pleasures and disasters of daily life to political spectacle and aesthetic triumph. They push to new limits a longstanding trend in Russian poetry of introducing more conversational and colorful language into traditional verse. Her poems show that she knows a considerable amount about poetry's history, and she puts that knowledge to work in poems that hold up to Russia the mirror of its own past and present. Anyone who wants to know why poetry still matters, or who wants to know about life in post-Soviet Russia, should read her work. Formerly a doctor and teacher of art and psychology in Voronezh, Fanailova is now a correspondent for Radio Liberty in Moscow. In 1999, she received the Andrei Bely Prize, one of the most coveted of Russia's literary awards.

About the author: Elena Nikolayevna Fanailova (born 19 December 1962) is a Russian poet. Born in Voronezh, she graduated from the Voronezh Medical Institute and earned a degree in journalism from Voronezh State University. She worked for six years as a doctor at Voronezh Regional Hospital. In 1995 she became a correspondent for Radio Svoboda, and has lived and worked in Moscow since the late nineties. She has contributed verse and literary reviews to Znamya, the New Literary Review, Critical Mass, Mitin Journal, and other publications. She has also translated the verses of Serhiy Zhadan from Ukrainian. She received the Andrei Bely Prize in 1999 and the Moscow Count Prize in 2003. Her poetry is characterized by its harsh outlook and precise language. During the early 2000s it came to be representative of the new Russian literary preoccupation with the theme of citizenship and the problems of personal historical memory and historical self-image.

Reviews:
Three Percent's Best Translated Book Award Winners
Djelloul Marbrook
Katie Eberhart @ Tarpaulin Sky Reviews