My work for the Queen’s Translation Exchange (QTE) at Oxford University is a great motivator to keep discovering new Russophone writing. And indeed, to explore what lies beyond the Russian language.

Last summer, through a connection with the Francis Skaryna Library in North London, I started to explore Belarusian poetry for the first time. And while this exploration helped me create new learning resources for the QTE, it also spurred me to both write a review of a translated collection of Belarusian language poetry, and to translate some poetry written in Belarusian myself.

As I encountered Belarusian properly for the first time, I grappled with a language that was both familiar in many ways, but which was utterly distinct from Russian. It was actually my knowledge of Ukrainian that helped the most when trying to decode what I was reading. Nonetheless, this challenge was a fruitful one. In the early months of 2026 I had the joy of RHINO poetry publishing my review of Vera Rich’s 1982 translated poetry collection, The Images Swarm Free (Read Here). Shortly afterwards Matter Monthly published a folio of poetry by female Belarusian poets that I translated from the Belarusian and Russian (Read Here).

I wonder what I will find next time I go looking.

After visiting Ukraine in the summer of 2024 I tried to capture something of that trip by combining my writing with analogue photos I took while in Odesa. I am so grateful to Natalie at the Indianapolis Review for publishing the result. You can read it here.

2025 is the year of photographic experimentation. I have learned how to use a dark room and begun experimenting with altering and degrading the photos I make and print. I am very grateful to Mia at the Field Project Zine for publishing two examples of these efforts.

The Zine can be read here. One photo from the Zine is immediately above this post. I was inspired by the daily process of forgetting dreams, imagining if dreams left physical traces behind them in the morning light.

I translated the first chapter of Misha Zakharov’s debut novel Doramaroman. Writing with sensitivity and intelligence, Misha combines film review, essay, and memoir to examine himself, the society he grew up in, and his queerness. This extract is the first step on that journey. Read here.

In February 2025 I had the pleasure of reviewing How Fire Descends, a poetry collection by the Ukrainian poet Serhiy Zhadan, translated by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps. Read here.

Here too is a review of Stanislav Aseyev’s The Torture Camp on Paradise Street (translated by Nina Murray and Zenia Tompkins). Written in February 2024