| Sasha Dugdale | |
| Honorific-Suffix: | FRSL |
| Birth Place: | Sussex, England |
| Occupation: | Poet, playwright, translator |
| Notableworks: | Joy Deformations |
| Awards: | Forward Prize Cholmondeley Award Lois Roth Award |
Sasha Dugdale FRSL is a British poet, playwright, editor and translator. She has written six poetry collections and is a translator of Russian literature.
Sasha Dugdale was born in 1974[1] in Sussex.[2]
Dugdale has published six poetry collections with Carcanet Press: Notebook (2003), The Estate (2007), Red House (2011), Joy (2017), Deformations (2020) and The Strongbox (2024). She won the 2016 Forward Poetry Prize for Best Single Poem, entitled Joy, and a Cholmondeley Award in 2017.
Dugdale specialises in translating contemporary Russian women poets and post-Soviet new writing for theatre. She has worked both in the United Kingdom and the United States on a number of productions, translating modern Russian plays.[3] She won English PEN Translates Awards for her translations of collections of poetry by the Russian poet Maria Stepanova.[4]
From 2012 to 2017 Dugdale was the editor of Modern Poetry in Translation, publishing sixteen issues of the magazine as well as its fiftieth year anniversary anthology Centres of Cataclysm (Bloodaxe, 2016). From 2015 to 2021 Dugdale directed the biennial Winchester Poetry Festival.[5] Dugdale was poet-in-residence at St John’s College, Cambridge between 2018 and 2021.
Dugdale's poetry has been featured in the Guardian[6] and her translation of Maria Stepanova's novel In Memory of Memory was shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize, the 2022 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the 2022 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and in 2021 was longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature.[7]
Dugdale won the MLA Lois Roth Award for her translation, the judges’ citation noted that: "Sasha Dugdale’s translation is a living text, the work of a poet, as attuned to the modernist voices of Mandelstam and Akhmatova as to those of Sebald and Barthes, flowing with admirable rhythm and a stunning breadth of vocabulary. In Dugdale’s hands, sentence after sentence is quotable, the shadows of the irretrievable past rippling through a complex, many-layered landscape."[8]