Elaine
Feinstein (nee Cooklin) is a
prize-winning poet, novelist, playwright, biographer
and translator.
She
was born in Liverpool , educated in
Leicester, and won an Exhibition to read English at
Newnham College, Cambridge. She went
up in 1949, only a year after the first
women were admitted to full membership of the
University. After graduating, she read for
the Bar in London. She returned to
Cambridge with her husband, the molecular
biologist Arnold Feinstein, in 1956, and they and their three sons
lived in the centre of that city for more than a quarter of
century. Writers from across the
world including Yevtushenko, Miroslav Holub, Allen Ginsberg and
Yehuda Amichai visited them
there.
Feinstein supervised
undergraduates for the English Tripos , lectured at the
University of Essex ( 1967-70) and
wrote for The Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian, The
Sunday Times, the New York Review of Books and other
papers. In 1981 she was made a
Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
As
a poet, she began to write under
the influence of Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams,
the Objectivists ---notably Charles Reznikoff---and Black
Mountain poets. In 1959 Charles Olson
sent her his famous letter defining breath
'prosody'. Alive to her family origins in the
Russian-Jewish daspora, she developed a close affinity with
the Russian poets of this and the last
century. Her versions of the poems of Marina
Tsvetaeva , for which she received three
translation awards from the Arts Council were first
published in 1971 and remain in print. Her poems have
been widely
anthologized. Her Collected Poems and
Translations (2002) was a Poetry Book Society Special
Commendation. In 1990, she received a
Cholmondeley Award for Poetry, and was given an Honorary
D.Litt from the University of Leicester .
She
has written fifteen novels, many radio plays and
television dramas. Her first novel, The
Circle (1970) was long listed for the ‘lost’ Man
Booker prize in
2010. Her five biographies
include A Captive Lion: the Life of Marina
Tsvetaeva (1987)
and Pushkin (1998). Ted
Hughes: The Life of a Poet (2001) was shortlisted for the
biennial Marsh Biography Prize. Her biography of Anna
Akhmatova, Anna of all the
Russias (2005) has been translated
into twelve languages, including Russian.
Elaine
Feinstein has travelled extensively, not only to read her
work at festivals across the world, but to be Writer in
Residence for the British Council, first in Singapore, and
then in Tromso, Norway. She was a Rockefeller
Foundation Fellow at Bellagio in 1998. Her work has
been translated into most European
languages. She has served as a judge for the
Gregory Awards, the Independent Foreign Fiction
Award, the
Costa Poetry Prize and the Rossica Award for Literature translated from
Russian, and in 1995 was chairman of the judges for the T.S. Eliot
Prize.
In
2005 she was awarded a Civil List pension in recognition of her
services to Literature
The Poetry Trust have
uploaded three new podcasts from the 22nd Aldeburgh Poetry Festival.
The Poetry Trust website features the Poetry Channel archive, including
over forty poetry podcasts. In the latest podcast acclaimed Carcanet
poet Elaine Feinstein discusses
her writing career with Robert Seatter. Elaine Feinstein has published
numerous translations, novels, biographies and poetry collections. Her
latest Carcanet collection, Cities, was published in 2010.
Click here to listen to the full
interview.
Some Unease
and Angels, Hutchinson; 1977, reprinted, 1981
Selected
Poems, University Center, Michigan, Green River Press,1977
The Feast of
Eurydice, Faber & Faber/ Next Editions, 1980
Badlands,
Hutchinson, 1987
City Music,
Hutchinson, 1990
Selected
Poems, Carcanet Press, 1994
Daylight,
Carcanet Press, 1997
After Pushkin
, (edited by Elaine Feinstein) (Folio Society & Carcanet
Press,1999)
Gold
, Carcanet Press, 2000)
Collected
Poems and Translations, Carcanet Press, 2002
Talking to
the Dead , Carcanet Press, 2000
Cities,
Carcanet Press, June 2010
Translated poetry
The Selected
Poems of Marina Tsvetayeva, Oxford University Press, 1971
Second edition, 1972, Penguin, Penguin USA
Bride Of
Ice: New Selected Poems of Marina Tsvetayeva (Carcanet
Press, 2009) ( including ' On The Red Horse', 'Girlfriend' ( lyrics for
Sofia Parnok), New Year's Greetings, ( for Rainer
Maria Rilke on his death) and a new
Introduction Third edition, Hutchinson, 1987