Literatureיורי קולקר

Yuri Kolker

Yuri Kolker is a Russian poet, essayist, literary critic and translator who emigrated from the Soviet Union to Israel in 1984.

born 1946Russian lyric poetrySamizdat edition of KhodasevichTranslations of English poetryBBC Russian Service radio magazines

Born: 14 March 1946, Saint Petersburg
Occupation: poet, translator, writer, literary critic
Education: Peter the Great Saint Petersburg State Polytechnical University

Yuri Kolker was born in 1946 in Saint Petersburg

Yuri Kolker was born in Leningrad in 1946. His mother, Valentina Chistyakova, was Russian, and his father, Joseph Kolker, was a Jewish electrical engineer educated in Germany. As a child he took part in officially approved literary groups.

He graduated with honors from the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute in 1969. In 1978 he received a PhD in physics and mathematics. In 1973 he married Tatiana Kostina, and their daughter Elizabeth was born in 1974.

His poems first appeared in a Soviet literary magazine in 1972, but after 1975 none of his work was published in the Soviet Union. He wrote for Samizdat and joined the Soviet dissident movement. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 he left his research job and worked as a boiler-room operator.

In 1983 he completed an annotated collection of the poems of Vladislav Khodasevich, which was soon reissued in Paris. After years as a refusenik, he emigrated to Israel in 1984. In 1989 he joined the BBC Russian Service in London, where he edited radio magazines.

He has translated Tennyson, Byron, Shelley, Dylan Thomas, García Lorca and Avrom Sutzkever, and published essays and memoirs. In 2009 he published an autobiography. He lives in the United Kingdom.