Bio

Elina Alter is a writer and translator. Her translations from Russian include Alla Gorbunova’s It’s the End of the World, My Love (Deep Vellum, 2023) and Oksana Vasyakina’s Wound (Catapult and MacLehose Press, 2023). Wound was one of the New Yorker’s Best Books of the Year, and its sequel, Steppe, is forthcoming in 2026. She lives in New York and works at Columbia University.

Project Description

To support the translation of the novel Steppe by Oksana Vasyakina from Russian. Steppe is a work of autofiction, the second in a trilogy published in 2022. As in Wound, the first novel in the trilogy, the narrator of Steppe, Oksana, is a talented young lesbian poet who has moved from Siberia to Moscow. Both Oksana's sexuality and her interest in art contribute to distancing her from her community and her parents, whom she nevertheless works hard to understand. While Wound focused on Oksana's mother, who died from breast cancer, Steppe focuses on her father, a petty criminal who was imprisoned for theft, became addicted to heroin, and contracted HIV. Vasyakina's queer themes and characters have made her novels crucial texts in a time of increasing government repression in Russia.