Margarita Meklina

MARGARITA MEKLINA is a bilingual fiction writer and essayist born in St. Petersburg, Russia. She came to the United States as a refugee in the early 1990s and spent twenty years in San Francisco; now she shares her life between Dublin, Ireland, and the San Francisco Bay Area. She received the 2003 Andrei Bely Prize (Russia’s first independent literary prize, which enjoys a special reputation for honouring dissident and nonconformist writing) for her short story collection Battle at St. Petersburg and the 2009 Russian Prize, awarded by the Yeltsin Center Foundation, for her manuscript My Criminal Connection to Art. In 2013, she was a finalist for the "Nonconformism" prize for her novella "Cervix" and in 2014 she was short-listed for "NOS," a prize given by the fund of Mikhail Prokhorov for "new social trends" in literature. Author of 6 books in her native Russian, she also completed a YA novel The Little Gaucho Who Loved Don Quixote in English (Black Wolf Edition & Publishing LTD, 2016). Translated into French and Swedish, two of her novellas are available as chapbooks Poussière d'étoiles (Etoiles, 2016) and Linea Nigra (Ars Interpres, 2017). In 2018, she was awarded Mark Aldanov Literary Prize for her novella 'Ulay in Lithuania.' The prize is given by New York's Novy Zhurnal to Russian writers living outside of Russia. With Anne Fisher, she curated a folio of Russian LGBTQ poetry and prose in translation to English which was printed by The Brooklyn Rail/In Translation in June 2019, to coincide with the Pride Month.

Due to the expanded anti-LGBTQ laws signed by Putin in December 2022, Meklina now faces an inability to be published in Russia. Her earlier book, written in collaboration with Lida Yusupova, “Love Has Four Hands,” was removed from Russian bookstores due to the anti-LGBTQ laws. Her new collection of short stories was supposed to be published in Moscow but is now subjected to self-censorship by the publishing house’s lawyers afraid to be penalized for publishing queer content.