Olga Martynova

Olga Martynova (born in 1962 in Dudinka, Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia) is a Russian-German writer. She writes poems in Russian, and prose and essays in German.

Olga Martynova grew up in Leningrad where she studied Russian literature and language and was active in various literary circles. After an exchange in Berlin in 1990, she moved in 1991 with her husband, the Russian poet, novelist and playwright Oleg Yuriev (1959–2018), and their son Daniel to Frankfurt, where they currently live.

Her numerous contributions in German-language periodicals have been translated into English, Polish, Slovakian, Bulgarian, Danish and, more recently, Russian. Her Russian poems have been translated, sometimes even self-translated, into German, English, Italian, Albanian and French. She also works as an essayist and reviewer for newspapers such as the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Die Zeit and the Frankfurter Rundschau.

Martynova was awarded the Hubert Burda Preis für junge Lyrik for poets from Eastern, Southern and Central Europe in 2000.

The 2006 book Rom liegt irgendwo in Russland (Rome lies somewhere in Russia) was written in collaboration with her friend, the Russian poet Elena Shvarts.

In 2010 she published her first novel, Sogar Papageien überleben uns (Even Parrots Survive Us), that tells in short sketches the story of a St. Petersburg literary scholar in Germany because of a literary conference, and seeking to reconnect with her former lover. The book made it onto the longlist of the German Book Prize and the shortlist of the aspekte-literature prize.

In 2012 Martynova won the prestigious Ingeborg-Bachmann-Prize with her text "Ich werde sagen: "Hi!". The story, with references to cultural history, focuses on a young man who experiences the simultaneous awakening of erotic feelings and an interest in poetry.