Dawn has no memory. Dusk remembers everything
Poetry Talk with Sasha Dugdale

Reading
Talk
Poesiefestival Berlin 2026
Atelierraum, silent green
← / →

© privat

Sasha Dugdale (born 1974 in Sussex) is an award-winning British poet and one of the most highly regarded literary translators from Russian (including works by Maria Stepanova) into English.

She has published numerous poetry collections, notably Joy (Carcanet Press 2017), whose title poem is written from the perspective of William Blake’s wife, and Deformations (Carcanet Press, 2020), an engagement with the artist Eric Gill and the allegations of sexual abuse made against him.

Her most recent collection, The Strongbox (Carcanet Press, 2024), artfully combines Greek mythology with modern history. Dugdale describes the book as a “Pandora’s box of voices, masks, and emotions.” It was written in 2022, in the midst of Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine. Dugdale writes: “The world became strange, and I felt once again that I didn’t recognise it and I would need poetry and myth to see it".

Readers encounter various mythological figures displaced into the present, such as Philemon and Baucis (who in Dugdale’s version steps on a landmine), or the learned centaur Chiron and his student Apollo. They follow Helen, who elsewhere gives her husband Menelaus math tutoring, into prophetic dreams, as well as the messenger god Hermes, who goes to the bathroom in winged sandals (“Hermes slept under a coat, puttees wrapped round ankles. / When he woke to use the lav the chain shone with hoar.”). Above all, myth here serves as a narrative framework through which the conflicts and wars of the present become visible. At one point it even states: “The world is revealed to be a tent on a battlefield.”

Sasha Dugdale in conversation with Olga Radetzkaja

The event will take place in English.