Margarita Meklina

An author of ten books and a recipient of literary prizes in Russia, she has published widely in English and was named "the winner of the month" by Unmanned Press in San Francisco for her novella "Multiple Children.

[10] Much of Meklina's fiction in English explores diverse topics that circulate loosely around memory, creative collaboration and the bifurcated experience of the culturally displaced and reinvented.

Her book Srazhenie pod Peterburgom [The Battle of St. Petersburg], which was included in the New Literary Review's Soft Wave series edited by renowned critic Ilja Kukulin, received the 2003 Andrey Bely Award for its stylistic experimentalism and linguistic novelty.

The subjects of her prose, for example—a homosexual writer, a homeless gigolo who married a rich circus entertainer, Egyptian terrorists—are in essence symbols of phantomlike and fragile realities, observed through the eyes of a woman who is eternally unsure of her own identity and is trying to assert herself through each gesture or phrase.

In Meklina's texts, a surrealistic phantasmagoria reminiscent of André Breton is tinged with utter skepticism and textual interplay, drawn from the novels of John Barth and Thomas Pynchon.

Included in Srazhenie pod Peterburgom, the novel Izmena [Betrayal] is the heroine's lyric confession as she goes back and forth between her old lover Vakhid and younger husband Aldo, accentuating the question of how women perceive physiology (of sexual desire).

[12] Writes Jenya Krein, "Meklina's prose is metaphysical in the way that she sees her world as in a fluid dream, where everything and everyone are interconnected, things and people, life and death, thoughts and outcomes, desires and reality.