In Conversation | Ilya Kaminsky & Ruth Padel | Granta

In Conversation

Ruth Padel & Ilya Kaminsky

‘Lines collect for years, but once in a while these lines meet up, and wink at other lines, go tangoing and make out, and a baby gets born – which is to say a stanza or if I am lucky the whole poem.’

Ruth Padel

Ruth Padel’s Beethoven Variations, A Life in Poems (Chatto),will be published by Knopf, USA in February 2021. Her new book We Are All From Somewhere Else (Vintage), addressing animal and human migration in poetry and prose, updates to 2020 her acclaimed 2012 volume, The Mara Crossing. She is Professor or Poetry at King’s College London and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. See www.ruthpadel.com.

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Ilya Kaminsky

Ilya Kaminsky was born in 1977 in Odessa, former Soviet Union, and arrived in the United States in 1993 when his family was granted asylum by the American government. He is the author of Deaf Republic (Faber) and Dancing in Odessa (Ark), co-translator of Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva and co-editor of Ecco Anthology of International Poetry. He teaches at Georgia Institute of Technology and lives in Atlanta.  

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