Something special for 2026: Irina Sadovina talking to Ruth Clarke about the art of translation, with a special focus on Anna Nerkagi's beautiful book, White Moss, which Irina translated in to English for the first time.
About White Moss:
On the eve of his wedding, young Alyoshka pines for an earlier love. Ilne chose to leave the nomadic Nenets community seven years before, moving to the city and taking his heart with her. Under increasing pressure to marry, Alyoshka struggles against the ancient Nenets customs of home and family, unwilling to give up his hope for another life.
Meanwhile, other painful transitions shake the foundations of the small camp. Deep in grief, Ilne’s father Petko feels he has no role left to play in the community, while Vanu strikes out on a difficult journey to try to soothe his troubled friends.
Deep in northern Siberia, minor human tragedies play out against the cold expanse of the tundra. With bursts of lyricism and a Chekhovian eye for human frailty, Anna Nerkagi crafts a multi-voiced drama of lost love and the clash between youthful dreams and the complex ties of home.
A stunning novel, mesmeric, revelatory, singular
Sara Baume, author of ‘Seven Steeples’
In its rawness, its sense of an impending apocalypse and its heavy religious allegory, Nerkagi’s fiction has few parallels in contemporary Russian literature
New Statesman
Anna Nerkagi was born in 1953 on the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia, and she belongs to the Indigenous Nenets community. As a child, she was separated from her parents by the Soviet authorities and sent to a boarding school, where Indigenous languages and cultural traditions were banned. She published her debut novel, Aniko of the Nogo Clan, in 1977, and in 1980 she returned to the Yamal Peninsula and the nomadic way of life. There she started the Tundra School for Nenets Children, where she still works as a teacher, blending traditional and modern forms of education.
Irina Sadovina translates literature from Russian and Mari. Her translations and writing have appeared in publications like Prototype, Meniscus, The Calvert Journal, and ellipse. She received the 2021 Australasian Association of Writing Programs Translation Prize and was a 2021–2022 National Centre for Writing Emerging Translator Mentee. She teaches Russian at the University of Sheffield.
Ruth Clarke is an editor and literary translator from Italian, French and Spanish. She has translated an eclectic range of work by authors from Benin to Venezuela. Ruth has taught Translation Studies at Newcastle and Durham Universities and hosts the translated fiction book club at Collected, Durham. She also promotes translation through New Spanish Books and Translate Swiss Books, and is a founding member of The Starling Bureau, a collective of literary translators.
