Please join Miranda Seymour for a conversation with Catherine Merridale about her new book I, Vera: The Many Lives of Vera Gedroits, a Radical Princess – the story of a writer, a princess, an ardent supporter of workers’ rights, and the world's first female professor of surgery amid one of history’s most turbulent periods.

Vera Gedroits was born in 1870 to a Lithuanian prince and a Russo-German mother. She trained as a medic while still a schoolgirl, travelled from Switzerland to Manchuria as a young woman, and spent years as a militant factory doctor in the provinces, where her political views drew the attention of the secret police. Later, she was summoned to work for the Romanovs in Tsarskoe Selo – where she became close with Akhmatova, Gumilev and Mandelstam and honed her own voice as a writer.

Finding herself in Kyiv after the Revolution, Vera became the city’s most respected surgeon amid the chaos of civil war. She also found the time to write and publish a Chekhovian series of narrative memoirs – her literary and medical careers making her an acute and compassionate observer of humanity. Yet she and her lover Countess Maria Nirod were caught up in Stalin’s purge of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, and she died two years later in extreme poverty, her name banished from official records and her literary and medical achievements forgotten.

Even now, Vera’s legacy is at risk; Miranda Seymour’s research draws on the personal archives of Vera’s descendents in Kharkiv, which have since been destroyed by Russia’s invasion. I, Vera brings back to the limelight an intrepid and trailblazing woman.

Miranda Seymour is a novelist, biographer and literary critic. She has been a Visiting Professor in Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent for several years and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She lives both in London and at her family’s ancestral home in Nottinghamshire. Seymour began writing as a historical novelist, moving from fiction into biography during the 1980s, and is known for her writing about the women left out of history. In 2025 she was awarded the Exceptional Contribution to Biography Award by the Biographers’ Club. Her books include Mary Shelley (Simon & Schuster, 2001), In Byron’s Wake: Annabella Milbanke and Ada Lovelace (Simon & Schuster, 2018), I Used To Live Here Once, The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys (William Collins 2022) and I, Vera (William Collins, 2026).

Catherine Merridale is an award-winning writer and broadcaster with an internationally acknowledged expertise in Russia and the former Soviet Union. Her non-fiction writing draws on twenty years of conversations and interviews in Russia and Ukraine, as well as on rare and original archival work. A pioneer of oral history in the region, her first major book, Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia (Granta, 2000), won the Royal Society of Literature's Heinemann Prize and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2001. Her most recent books, both published by Allen Lane, include Lenin on the Train and Red Fortress: The Secret Heart of Russia's History, which won the Pushkin House Book Prize and the Wolfson History Prize in 2014. Merridale is a Fellow of the British Academy. Her first fiction book the detective novel, Moscow Underground, was published with HarperCollins Fontana in 2025.

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