Oksana Vasyakina is a poet, activist and novelist. She was born in 1989 to a working-class family in the Siberian city of Ust-Ilimsk, Russia. In 2019 she was awarded the Lyceum Prize for her poetry, which appears in English translation in n+1, in the collection This Is Us Losing Count and in PEN America’s Verses on the Vanguard: Russian Poetry Today. Wound won the prestigious NOS literary prize in 2021, and was additionally chosen as the Critics’ Academy Choice.
‘Into the carrot-coloured bag, alongside my clothes, I put the box with Mama’s urn.’
An excerpt from Oksana Vasyakina’s Wound, translated from the Russian by Elina Alter.
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