Dr Olga Kenton

• PhD Creative Writing, University of Birmingham
• BA/MA in Creative Writing, Maxim Gorky Literature Institute, Moscow

I have joined the Department of Modern Languages in 2019. In 2024, I received a Fellowship in Higher Education from Advance HE. As a prose writer and journalist, I have interviewed and published articles with leading Russian and Russian-speaking filmmakers, theatre directors, actors, writers, and artists and taught Creative Writing Foundation modules to UG students at the Department of Film and Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham. My main publications include interviews with Andrey Zvyagintsev, Nikolas Pasternak-Slater, Marianna Yarovskaya, Dolya Gavanski, Diana Vishneva, a Formula 1 driver Daniil Kvyat, novels At the Edge of the World, The Girl from the House on Embankment and Gorillas in Green.

As a specialist in Russian at all levels, I developed and delivered the Business Russian module to final-year UG students and taught a range of Russian undergraduate modules. I have additionally taught the postgraduate Reading Russian for Researchers module; I have also organised and run Russian-language Creative Writing and Russian Journalism clubs for UG students.

In 2024/25, I am acting as a convenor and a personal tutor for Core III/IV.

I am a specialist in creative writing and Russian émigré literature. My doctoral thesis, entitled “The Silent Voices of Russian Immigration" (creative portion) and "A Chorus Of Voices: Narrative Strategies For Representing Russian Émigré Voices in Gaito Gazdanov’s Night Roads, Sergei Dovlatov’s A Foreign Woman, Zinovy Zinik’s At Home Abroad And Olga Kenton’s The Silent Voices Of Russian Immigration" (critical portion), was a practice-based research project that explored the representation of voices of Russian immigrants in émigré literature and creative nonfiction.

My current research focuses on translingual and exophonic writing in fiction of the Russian émigré writers of the third and fourth wave of Russian emigration. I explore the impact of the linguistic hybridity of their narratives in a new cultural context, while also analysing the role of language in shaping narrative and stylistic choices.

Examples of recent talks and conference participation:

Paper, “Beyond the Mother Tongue: Translingual and Exophonic Writing in Zinovy Zinik’s Mind the Doors and Lara Vapnyar’s Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love.” Symposium on Russophone Literary Diversity, University of Birmingham (September 2024)

Other contribution:

Co-author (Kenton, Rulyova), MA Russian for Postgraduate Researchers, Oxford School of Global and Area Studies (2022/23)

Co-author (Kenton, Rulyova), Russian Language for Postgraduate Researchers: Intermediate to Advanced. Routledge (TBC).