Biography
Alexandr Skidan (born in Leningrad, 1965) is a poet, critic, essayist, and translator. He attended The Free University (1989–1992), while working as a stoker in a boiler house (1985–2002). His poetry collections include Delirium (1993), In the Re-Reading (1998), Red Shifting (2005), Dissolution (2010) and, most recently, Membra disjecta (2015). He is also an author of four books of essays, Critical Mass (1995), The Resistance to/of Poetry (2001), Sum of Poetics (2013) and Theses Toward Politicization of Art and Other Texts (2014). He has translated contemporary American poetry and fiction into Russiаn, as well as theoretical works by 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 is the recipient of the Andrey Bely Prize in poetry for the collection Red Shifting (2006) and of the Award “Most” (“Bridge”) for the best critical text on poetry (2006). His poetry has been translated into many languages and published in anthologies. In 2008 his book Red Shifting was published in the USA by Ugly Duckling Presse. He is a member of Chto Delat’? working group and is a co-editor of the New Literary Observer magazine. He lives in Saint-Petersburg.