Putin's Postbox

Marcel Beyer, born in Tailfingen/Württemberg in 1965, grew up in Kiel and Neuss. He studied German and English literature in Siegen, writing an MA thesis on the poet Friederike Mayröcker in 1992. A poet, essayist and novelist, he has also translated poetry by Gertrude Stein and Michael Hofmann. Marcel Beyer has received numerous awards including Germany’s most prestigious, the Georg Büchner Prize. He has lived in Dresden since 1996.Katy Derbyshire was born in London and has lived in Berlin for over twenty years. She is an award-winning translator of contemporary German writers, including Olga Grjasnowa, Angela Steidele and Heike Geissler. Her own writing has appeared in Lithub, Merkur, Der Tagesspiegel, Zeit Online and The Guardian. She won the Straelen Translation Prize for her work on Clemens Meyer’s Bricks and Mortar in 2018.Katy Derbyshire is a translator, writer and editor based in Berlin for three decades. She translates contemporary German writers including Judith Hermann, Clemens Meyer and Inka Parei, and co-hosts a monthly translation lab. Her most recent publication is Zsuzsanna Gahse’s Mountainish, published by Prototype and shortlisted for the inaugural John Calder Translation Prize. Katy is the publisher of the V&Q Books imprint.

'In the geographical movement eastwards, the decades after 1989 take shapein a wealth of acoustic, visual and atmospheric perceptions: fonts, posters,buildings, modes of transport are witnesses as important as the peoplethemselves.’