Vladimir Mayakovsky

Editor BiographyRosy Patience Carrick was born in the north-west of England in 1982. She is a poet and a Mayakovsky scholar, and runs several regular poetry and cabaret club events in Brighton, where she lives with her daughter Olive. Since 2010 she has co-hosted various festival poetry stages, including Latitude and Glastonbury Poetry & Words. Rosy teaches English literature, poetry and performance skills at schools, universities and community settings around the UK, and is currently writing a PhD thesis on Mayakovsky at the University of Sussex.

This groundbreaking collection draws together for the first time Mayakovsky's key translators from the 1930s to the present day, bringing some remarkable works back into print in the process and introducing poems which have never before been translated.'This exhibition is not a jubilee, it's an account of my work. I demand help - not the glorification of non-existent virtues. That's what we are talking about, comrades, and not about glorifying private persons.' Mayakovsky was a poet, playwright, artist, director, actor, diarist, producer of agitprop posters and advertisement slogans, and writer of articles, essays and speeches. The inherent conflict of his status as an avant-garde communist writer working within the steadily narrowing cultural conditions of early Soviet Russia runs vividly throughout his work, and was a significant contributing factor to his suicide at the age of thirty-six. This groundbreaking collection draws together for the first time Mayakovsky's key translators from the 1930s to the present day, bringing some remarkable works back into print in the process and introducing poems which have never before been translated.The radical scope of its representation makes for the most comprehensive account of Mayakovsky's work to date - an account which charts not only the extraordinary range of his creative output, his rigorous and passionate innovation of language and form, and the intense power of his electrifying live performances, but also the fascinating and turbulent history of Mayakovsky's cultural and political representation in the western world. Edited by Rosy Patience Carrick