Elaine Feinstein

Elaine Feinstein was a poet, novelist, and biographer. She received many prizes, including a Cholmondeley Award for Poetry, Society of Authors’, Wingate and Arts Council Awards, and an Honorary D.Litt from the University of Leicester. 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 novel, The Russian Jerusalem (Carcanet Press, 2008). Her collection Cities came out in 2010, Portraits in 2015 and her new and selected poems, The Clinic, Memory, in 2017. She served on the Council of the Royal Society of Literature, of which she was a Fellow, as a judge for many literary awards, and as a Chair of the Judges for the T. S. Eliot Prize. She received a Civil List Pension in 2010. She died in September 2019. Photo © Sara Bowman