Please join Irina Sadovina and Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse, two translators of Indigenous literature from Russian, as they discuss the joys and challenges of bringing ancient and modern Chukchi, Nenets, and Nganasan stories to English-speaking readers. Their conversation will focus on Sadovina’s forthcoming translation of White Moss by Nenets writer Anna Nerkagi, and Chavasse’s translation of When the Whales Leave by Chukchi author Yuri Rytkheu, and will be moderated by Hamid Ismailov.

How much do you domesticate? How much do you insist on strangeness, and how much do you highlight the ordinariness of everyday life? How do you translate an oral performance? Meaningful silences? The chirping of an Arctic bird? The many, many kinds of snow? 

Anna Nerkagi was born in 1953 on the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia, and belongs to the Indigenous Nenets community. White Moss (originally published in 1996) is a novel about tradition and change in a tiny Siberian community that provides unique insights into their everyday experiences whilst telling a wise, universal story of growing up and losing love.

Yuri Rytkheu was born in 1930 in the village of Uelen on the Bering Strait, the easternmost settlement of Russia. His novel When the Whales Leave (1975) is a vibrant retelling of the Chukchi creation myth, a generational saga and a parable about the destructive nature of the human ego.

Dr Irina Sadovina is University Teacher of Russian at the School of Languages, Arts and Societies, the University of Sheffield. She translates literature from Russian and Mari, and her translations and writing have appeared in publications including Prototype, Meniscus, The Calvert Journal, and Ellipse. She received the 2021 Australasian Association of Writing Programs Translation Prize and was a 2021–2022 National Centre for Writing Emerging Translator Mentee. Her most recent translation is Anna Nerkagi’s White Moss (Pushkin Press, 2026).

Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse is the translator of, among others, Aleksandr Skorobogatov’s Russian Gothic, Elena Kostyuchenko’s I Love Russia (winner of the Pushkin House Book Prize 2024), the forthcoming Village at the Edge of Noon by Darya Bobyleva, and three novels by Yuri Rytkheu, including When the Whales Leave (Milkweed, 2020). A child of the former USSR and a transplanted American teenager, for many years she has made her home in London.

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