The Transnational Series hosts Maria Stepanova and Sasha Dugdale in conversation with Sophie Pinkham to honor the release of The Disappearing Act, Stepanova's stunning new dreamlike work about exile and art.

This event is part of the Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith, co-hosted by Community Bookstore in Brooklyn, NY, Third Place Books in Seattle, Wa, Another Story Bookshop in Toronto, ON, and Lighthouse Bookshop in Edinburgh, UK. The series focuses on stories of migration, the intersection of politics and literature, and works in translation.

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Poet, novelist, essayist, and journalist, Maria Stepanova is the author of ten poetry collections and three books of essays. Her novel In Memory of Memory won Russia's Big Book Award in 2018 and was published in English, in Sasha Dugdale's translation, in 2021. She was awarded the Berman Literature Prize for In Memory of Memory, and was also shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, and the James Tait Black Prize for Biography. Stepanova founded and was editor-in-chief of the online independent crowd-sourced journal Colta.ru, which engaged with the cultural, social, and political reality of contemporary Russia until the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine when all dissenting media in Russia were forced to shut down. As a prominent critic of Putin’s regime, she had to leave Russia and is now living in exile.

Sasha Dugdale is a poet and translator. Her sixth book of poetry is The Strongbox, published in 2024. Deformations was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot and Derek Walcott Prizes. Her long poem "Joy" won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem of 2016. Dugdale's translation of Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory was shortlisted for the International Booker and won the MLA Lois Roth Award. She has translated two of Stepanova’s poetry collections and work by a number of Russian-language women poets, including Elena Shvarts and Marina Tsvetaeva. For many years she specialized in translating Russian-language new writing for theaters in the UK and US, including the New York Public Theater and the UK’s Royal Court Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company.

Moderator Sophie Pinkham is a professor at Cornell University and a former NEH Public Scholar. She is the author of The Oak and the Larch: A Forest History of Russia and Its Empires and Black Square: Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine. Her writing on Russia and Ukraine has appeared in the New York Review of Books, New York Times, Guardian, and Harper’s. She lives in Ithaca, New York.

Another Story Bookshop is a progressive independent bookstore based in Toronto. Since 1987, Another Story has been bringing great books to new readers, with an emphasis on social justice, equity, and diversity.

Community Bookstore, celebrating over 50 years in Park Slope, is Brooklyn's oldest operating bookstore.

Lighthouse is a queer-owned and women led independent community bookshop based in Edinburgh. They are an unapologetically activist, intersectional, feminist, antiracist, lgbtq+ community space. In 2020 they were named Scotland’s Best Independent Bookshop!

Third Place Books is dedicated to the creation of a community around books and the ideas inside them. With locations in Lake Forest Park and Seattle's Ravenna and Seward Park neighborhoods, Third Place Books is proud to serve the entire Seattle metro area.