Author: Olga Zilberbourg

Olga Zilberbourg’s English-language debut LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES (WTAW Press) explores “bicultural identity hilariously, poignantly,” according to The Moscow Times. It also dives into topics of bisexuality and immigrant parenthood. Anthony Marra called it “…a book of succinct abundance, dazzling in its particulars, expansive in its scope,” and Karen Bender said, “Olga Zilberbourg is a writer to read right now.” Zilberbourg’s writing has appeared in World Literature Today, The Believer, Electric Literature, Lit Hub, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Born in Leningrad, USSR in a Russian-speaking Jewish family, she makes her home in San Francisco, California. She has published four collections of stories in Russia, including most recent Задержи дыхание [Hold Your Breath] from Vremya Press. She serves as a consulting editor at Narrative Magazine and as a co-facilitator of the San Francisco Writers Workshop. Together with Yelena Furman, she has co-founded Punctured Lines, a feminist blog about literature from the former Soviet Union. She is currently at work on her first novel.

The International Day Against Homophobia: An Excerpt from Evgeny Shtorn’s The Refugee Chronicles, translated by Alexandra Novitskaya

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ Leave a comment

Evgeny Shtorn, a writer, activist, and scholar, was born and raised in Soviet Kazakhstan and later lived, studied, and worked in St. Petersburg, Russia. His LGBTQ+ activism made him a target of Russia’s intensifying state-managed homophobia, and in 2018, Shtorn was forced to leave the country. A human rights organization helped him obtain a visa to Ireland, where he received refugee status. As a refugee, Shtorn entered the system of “direct provision” that funnels asylum seekers in Ireland through a series of dormitory-style housing centers. Deprived of the right to work, surviving on basic assistance, and repeatedly questioned and probed by government bureaucrats, Shtorn was forced to share his personal space with strangers, often with incompatible backgrounds.

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New Perspectives on a Familiar Past: An Interview with Maxim Matusevich by Svetlana Satchkova

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 1 Comment

Maxim Matusevich’s fiction is filled with people crossing borders — between countries, languages, identities, and versions of the past. That seems fitting for a writer whose own life has taken him from a communal apartment in Soviet Leningrad to army barracks, from pizza delivery in Oklahoma to academic archives in Nigeria, and eventually to a career as a historian and writer in the United States. Now Professor and Chair of the Department of History at Seton Hall University, Matusevich has recently published his first book of fiction, the short story collection Six Trains of No Return (Academic Studies Press, 2026). We spoke on Zoom about the unlikely path that led him to fiction, the relationship between history and memory, and why he keeps returning to lives shaped by displacement and reinvention.

— Svetlana Satchkova

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Creating a Vivid World: A Q&A with Lisa C. Hayden, the translator of Egana Djabbarova’s My Dreadful Body

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 5 Comments
Book cover of My Dreadful Body

The publication of Egana Djabbarova’s My Dreadful Body by New Vessel Press earlier this year is an important contribution to feminist russophone literature available to readers in English translation. Following the excerpt from this novel we published recently from the opening of the seventh chapter, “Tongue,” we’re taking the opportunity to dive a little deeper into the context, structure, and language of this remarkable book in our interview with its translator, Lisa C. Hayden. We are deeply grateful to Hayden, who also brought to anglophone readers books by Guzel Yakhina, Margarita Khemlin, Narine Abgaryan, Marina Stepnova, and Katerina Gordeeva, among others, for insights into her translation work.

Olga Zilberbourg: What considerations went into your decision to translate My Dreadful Body?

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A Psychological Thriller with a Touch of Mythology: An Excerpt from Svetlana Satchkova’s The Undead

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ Leave a comment

Svetlana Satchkova’s English-language debut, The Undead: A Novel of Modern Russia, was published earlier this year by Melville House Publishing to rave reviews. It’s a story of an aspiring Moscow filmmaker, Maya Kotova, who makes an arthouse horror movie as a commentary on the fragility of human nature, and then finds herself arrested and prosecuted because her movie is deemed a threat to the Russian government. In Moscow circa 2017, during the era of the Kirill Serebrennikov trial, there is no longer room for apolitical art. Satchkova, who had just ended her career in film journalism at the time when her novel is set, beautifully captures the sense of an extravagant party mixed with paranoia gripping Moscow’s film industry at the time.

Book Cover of Svetlana Satchkova's The Undead

Satchkova has previously published three novels in Russian and is a longtime contributor to Punctured Lines. She has brought us interviews with some of the preeminent writers working in Russian today: her interview with Tatsiana Zamirovskaya back in 2020 (first published in Storytel and translated to English by Fiona Bell), her conversations with Anna Starobinets and Maria Stepanova, and a translation of an interview Satchkova gave to Egor Mikhailov of Afisha Daily about a Russian-language novel of hers published in 2021, Люди и птицы [People and Birds].

We’re grateful to Melville House Publishing for allowing us to run an excerpt from this highly entertaining and illuminating novel. This excerpt comes from Chapter Three of the novel, when Maya and her sister Polina visit their parents, and Maya shares the good news of signing a film contract for the movie she wrote.

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Waiting to Exhale: A Q&A with Natalie Oceanheart, author of Life Beyond Fear: A Ukrainian Woman’s Memoir, by Katya Cengel

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 1 Comment

Natalie Oceanheart begins Life Beyond Fear: A Ukrainian Woman’s Memoir (Potomac Books) with the escalation of fighting in Ukraine in 2022. At the time, Oceanheart is just starting out her adult life and yet the choices she makes as a daughter, wife, and mother — as well as a recent college graduate — are made amidst the chaos, despair, and danger of war. Born in eastern Ukraine, Oceanheart experienced the war from Russia’s first hybrid attack in 2014, and she backtracks to explain this, as well as the difficult choices she and her nuclear family make as they become internal refugees and then later leave Ukraine. At its core this is a coming-of-age story, which despite the bleakness of the situation offers hope through Oceanheart’s desire to act as a healer. I hold onto that hope as I once held onto the hope I saw while reporting on the protests that led to the Orange Revolution.

— Katya Cengel

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Tongue: An Excerpt from Egana Djabbarova’s My Dreadful Body, translated by Lisa C. Hayden

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 1 Comment

We’re celebrating today the arrival of an eagerly anticipated novel that portrays the life of a young woman from a traditional Azerbaijani community in Russia. A feminist poet, essayist, scholar, and educator, Egana Djabbarova is the author of five books in Russian. In English, her work has previously appeared in the anthology F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry, edited by Galina Rymbu, Eugene Ostashevsky, and Ainsley Morse (read our conversation with Ostashevsky and Morse). My Dreadful Body is Djabbarova’s first book in translation to English. The team behind this book includes Lisa C. Hayden, a beloved and celebrated translator from Russian, and New Vessel Press, an indie publisher specializing in literature in translation with a very strong list of titles from the countries of the former Soviet Union.

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Video from Eastern European Voices for Resistance and Reinvention

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ Leave a comment

Thanks to those of you who could attend our event, Eastern European Voices for Resistance and Reinvention, hosted by Library Nineteen in Baltimore on March 7. We loved having you as our audience and hope to continue the conversations in various ways.

Ukraine needs all of our support. While there are many ways to help, we’re asking for donataions to Ukraine TrustChain, an organization that helps evacuate civilians out of war zones: https://www.ukrainetrustchain.org/

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Eastern European Voices for Resistance and Reinvention

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Background: Blue Foreground: Words in yellow read : Resistance + Reinvention Eastern European Voices Words in black read : A Benefit for Ukraine
Background: Blue Foreground: Word in yellow reads: Featuring Words in white read: Alina Adams, Valerie Bandura, Svetlana Binshtok, Daniel Blokh, Katie Farris, Katarzyna Jakubiak, Victoria Juharyan, Andrea Jurjevic, Ilya Kaminsky, Julia Kolchinsky, Maria Kuznetsova, Ellen Litman, Olga Livshin, olga mikolaivna, Asya Partan, Irina Reyn, Ena Selimović, Lucy Silbaugh, Lana Spendl, Alina Stefanescu, Natalya Sukhonos, Vlada Teper, Katherine E. Young, Tatsiana Zamirovskaya, Olga Zilberbourg, and Lena Zycinsky.

When: March 6, 7:00 pm

Where: Library Nineteen
606 S. Ann St, Baltimore MD, 21231

This one-of-a-kind reading brings together writers from Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet countries who now make their homes across the United States. Taking place during the 2026 AWP Conference, the event celebrates a growing circle of poets, prose writers, and translators from complex, cross-cultural identities whose work is shaped by displacement and immigration, survival and resilience.

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“everybody knows . . .” An Excerpt from Nadezhda in the Dark by Yelena Moskovich

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 2 Comments

Today, in the US, we welcome a new book by Ukrainian-born American and French author Yelena Moskovich. Innovative Dzanc Books is bringing to us Nadezhda in the Dark, a novel-in-verse, previously published in the United Kingdom by Footnote Press. We’re deeply grateful to independent presses that make great books accessible to readers across the world. Please support Dzanc Books by ordering your copy today!

When asked to contribute our responses to this book, Yelena Furman said:

“Brimming with references from Russian and Ukrainian literatures to Alla Pugacheva and the Moscow 1990s gay club scene, Nadezhda in the Dark is a poetic disquisition on global history and self-identity. Discussions of Soviet anti-Semitism and the war in Ukraine merge with explorations of immigration and queer love. In language simultaneously lyrical and sharp, Moskovich shows how the personal and political, the present and past, are inextricably linked in ways that are often traumatic but also occasionally hopeful.”

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Owning Fear, Reaching for Freedom: Post-Soviet Writers + Translators Speak Out

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ Leave a comment
A flyer displaying ten author's photos alongside three quarters perimeter. In the center left, in black, title of the event: OWNING FEAR, REACHING FOR FREEDOM: POST-SOVIET WRITERS AND TRANSLATORS SPEAK OUT on the right, in red: LIT CRAWL SAN FRANCISCO Below, in Blue: Sat OCTOBER 25TH 5-6 PM AT RUTH'S TABLE 2160 21st Street Sponsored by California Humanities and Ruth's Table

Dear Punctured Lines community — please help us spread the word about the next San Francisco Bay Area reading by writers born in the former USSR. This event is a part of San Francisco’s annual Lit Crawl festival and will take place at Ruth’s Table (3160 21st Street) on October 25, 2025 at 5 pm.

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