Премия Вавилона

Лауреат 2021 – Лида Юсупова

In English

Lida Yusupova, the first holder of the Vavilon prize, was born 10 December 1963 in Petrozavodsk, from where she moved to Leningrad in 1981. She had graduated from the Leningrad State University School of Journalism and worked at the Leningrad radio as a kids' shows producer. In 1996 Yusupova left Russia for Jerusalem. Since 2004 she is based in Toronto (Canada) and San Pedro (Ambergris Caye island, Belize) . Yusupova is the author of numerous publications in Russian periodicals, including “Vozdukh”, “Novoye Literaturnoye Obozreniye” (New Literary Observer) and “Mitin Zhurnal”, as well as in online projects like TextOnly (textonly.ru) and Snob (snob.ru). Her first poetry collection appeared in 1995, recent collections include “Ritual C-4” (2013), Dead dad (2016), “Prigovory” (Verdicts; 2020) and “Shtorka” (Curtain; 2021). Yusupova also has co-authored the stories collection “U liubvi chetyre ruki” (Love has four hands; 2008) with Margarita Meklina. The bilingual Russian and English edition of Lida Yusupova's poems The Scar We Know was published recently in the US (Cicada Press, 2021). Yusupova's poetry was anthologized in “Osvobozhdenny Uliss” (Ulysses Released: Russian poetry beyond Russia; 2004, Novoye Literaturnoye Obozreniye, Russia) and “F-Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry” (2020, isolarii, UK). In 2017 she was awarded with “Razlichiye” (Difference) prize from the circle of Russian young critics.

The Scar We Know

Editor’s Introduction

Ainsley Morse

As these poems show, Yusupova’s activism is personal, idiosyncratic, and literary; her attitude toward ideological dogmatism, like that of many people who came of age in the Soviet Union, is healthily dosed with irony and a sense of the absurd. In this respect her work diverges from many of today’s activists, the Soviet dissidents, and the nineteenth-century civic lyricists—and perhaps from many American political poets as well....

Reports of Grave Foreboding

Oksana Vasyakina

Yusupova’s language aims to turn into what it describes; it aims to be methodical and objective. And it ends up disappointed in its own inability to be objective. Hers is a language of disappointment and entrancement. But it is also a language of the vital quest for ways to express experience....

Poems

then he took Irina by the arms
and dragged her about 5 meters away from the stream
threw the corpse into the bushes
after which he covered her with grass
that he had picked nearby
 
the court takes into account the immorality
 
the court takes into account the immorality of the victim’s behavior
 
the court takes into account the immorality and wrongfulness of the victim’s behavior
 
the court takes into account the positive reputation of the accused in his community
and the immorality and wrongfulness of the victim’s behavior....

Reviews

The poet brings the dead close to us and allows us to grieve for the ways they died, no matter how far away and long ago....