Richard Lourie

After being awarded the Sneath Poetry Prize by Robert Lowell in 1960, Richard Lourie published his first book of poems My Only Crime a prompt 64 years later. He had been waylaid by Russia. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, three of his grandparents and his father were born in the Russian empire. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Berkeley and to translate more than thirty books from Russian and Polish, including works by Czeslaw Milosz, Andrei Sakharov, Vladimir Voinovich, and Aleksander Wat. He has published eleven books of his own, including the novels The Autobiography Of Joseph Stalin, Zero Gravity, First Loyalty and A Hatred For Tulips, as well as Sakharov: A Biography, Putin: His Downfall And Russia’s Coming Crash, Hunting The Devil, and Russia Speaks: An Oral History From The Revolution To The Present.