A family memoir by the Russian poet Maria Stepanova and translated by UK poet Sasha Dugdale - both pictured - has been included on the longlist for the International Booker Prize. In addition to In Memory of Memory, Stepanova’s poetry collection War of the Beasts and the Animals, and a collection of essays and poems titled The Voice Over, are also being published in English this year.

War of the Beasts and the Animals (also translated by Dugdale) was written in 2014 and 2015, during Russia’s conflict with Ukraine. “I had a feeling that events were doing something significant to the language I’m writing in, that its outlines were changing, getting distorted, fragmented, broken, the sentences running mad, losing themselves,” she says of the collection. “I started writing in an attempt to find a place for all the dispersed fragments of used language units, poetry lines, military terms and Soviet war songs, to understand better what has happened to us all.”

PHRTOGRAPH: BLOODAXE BOOKS