Award-Winning Poet, Novelist, and Editor Maria Stepanova is the Newest Georgetown Global Dialogues Fellow
Stepanova joins seven other leading writers and critics as a GGD Fellow.
From poetry that meditates on displacement to fiction tracing the survival of an ordinary Jewish family in Russia, Maria Stepanova has long fused literature and civic courage. She is the author of ten poetry collections, three books of essays, and two novels. In 2007, Stepanova founded the website OpenSpace.ru, which published essays, criticism, and reported features. In 2012, due to the Russian government’s increased pressure on journalists, she was forced to shut down the site. The arts and culture website Colta.ru that she subsequently founded was again shut down after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Amid an increasingly constrained cultural landscape, Stepanova’s work has garnered sustained critical acclaim. Her landmark novel In Memory of Memory, published in English in 2021, won the Bolshaya Kniga Award and was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. Her poetry collections War of the Beats and the Animals (2021) and Holy Winter 20/21 (2024), are Poetry Book Society Translation Choices and received PEN Translates awards.
Stepanova now lives in Berlin, where she continues to write. Her recent work continues to grapple with themes of banishment and identity in exile, including in her most recent novel The Disappearing Act (2026). She will join the other GGD Fellows this year in Doha and Yogyakarta for conversations about finding hope and pursuing transformative change in a broken world.