Portraits

Feinstein Elaine

Elaine Feinstein has always written with most intensity about people. In this book, she remembers friends she has loved, writers she has known and literary figures from the past. She writes of the Russian poet Bella Akhmadulina with tender admiration; the East End poet Emanuel Litvinoff, at work in his Bloomsbury flat; and Masha Enzenberger, who brought Feinstein into the Russian world of Marina Tsvetaeva. As she imagines Raymond Chandler, Isaac Rosenberg or Billie Holiday her words about them say things about herself. In the closing poem, "Death and the Lemon Tree", she finds a compelling image for the privilege of continuing to write into old age.

About the Author

Elaine Feinstein is a poet, novelist, and biographer. She has received many prizes, including a Cholmondeley Award for Poetry, Society of Authors', Wingate and Arts Council Awards, the Daisy Miller Prize for her experimental novel The Circle, (long-listed for the "lost" Man Booker prize in 2010) and an Honorary D.Litt from the University of Leicester. She has travelled across the world to read her poems, and her books have been translated into most European languages; also Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Her versions of the poems of Marina Tsvetaeva, a New York Times Book of the Year, have remained in print since 1971. She was given a major grant from the Arts Council to write her most recent novel, The Russian Jerusalem, a phantasmagoric mix of prose and poetry (Carcanet, 2008). She has served on the Council of the Royal Society of Literature, of which she is a Fellow, as a judge for most of the current literary prizes, and as Chair of the Judges for the T. S. Eliot Award. She received a Civil List Pension in 2010.

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