Aleksandr Skidan

Aleksandr Skidan was born in Leningrad in 1965. He is a poet, critic, essayist, and translator. Skidan attended The Free University (1989–1992) while working as a stoker in a boiler house (1985–2002). His Russian-language poetry collections include Delirium (1993), In the Re-Reading (1998), Red Shifting (2005), Dissolution (2010), and most recently Membra disjecta (2015). He is also the author of four books of essays in Russian: Critical Mass (1995), The Resistance to/of Poetry (2001), Sum of Poetics (2013), and Theses Toward Politicization of Art (2014). He has translated contemporary American poetry and fiction into Russian, as well as theoretical works of Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Jean-Luc Nancy, Paolo Virno, and Gerald Raunig. In 1998, he received the Turgenev Award for short prose. He was a winner of the Andrey Bely Prize in poetry for the collection Red Shifting and the Most (Bridge) Award for the best critical text on poetry, both in 2006. In 2008, his book Red Shifting was published in English by Ugly Duckling Presse. He is a member of the Chto Delat’? (What Is To Be Done?) working group and a coeditor of Moscow’s New Literary Observer magazine. He lives in Saint Petersburg.