White Moss Translated: From Mentorship to Publication
Join Irina Sadovina, translator of White Moss, as she discusses her journey in bringing Nerkagi’s novel to English-language readers.
White Moss by Anna Nerkagi (forthcoming January 2026) is a poetic and fiercely moving novel set deep in northern Siberia, where a story of minor human tragedies among the Nomadic Nenets people play out against the cold expanse of the tundra. But how did this remarkable novel find its way into English translation?
Join Irina Sadovina, translator of White Moss and alumna of NCW’s Emerging Translator Mentorships Programme (2021), as she discusses her journey in bringing Nerkagi’s novel to English-language readers. She will be joined by her translator-mentor Oliver Ready and Rory Williamson, editor at Pushkin Press, who will share further insight into Irina’s translation process and how an initial pitch became a forthcoming publication.
Their conversation will be chaired by Rebecca DeWald, Programme Manager at the National Centre for Writing.
Irina Sadovina
Irina Sadovina translates literature from Russian and Mari, and her translations and writing have appeared in publications including Prototype, Meniscus, The Calvert Journal, and Ellipse.
She was a 2021–2022 National Centre for Writing Emerging Translator Mentee, and received the 2021 Australasian Association of Writing Programs Translation Prize. Her translation of Anna Nerkagi’s White Moss is coming out with Pushkin Press in 2026. She is a University Teacher of Russian at the School of Languages, Arts and Societies, the University of Sheffield.
Oliver Ready
Oliver Ready is a literary translator and scholar who teaches at St Edmund Hall, Oxford.
His translations include Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Gogol’s Essential Stories, and four novels by Vladimir Sharov (1952-2018). He has received three prizes for his translations of recent Russian fiction and was shortlisted for the PEN Translation Prize for Crime and Punishment. He has recently completed a biographical study of Nikolai Gogol.
Image © Ania Ready
Rory Williamson
Rory Williamson is a literary editor at Pushkin Press.
He was born in Glasgow and studied literature in Cambridge and Montreal. Before starting in publishing, he proofread a lot of academic essays and made a few decent flat whites. He’s drawn to surprising or unusual books and likes to read widely across different cultures in translation. Rory is currently shortlisted for the TA First Translation Prize for co-editing, with John Siciliano, Gwendolyn Harper’s translation translation from Spanish of A Last Supper of Queer Apostles by Pedro Lemebel (Pushkin Press).
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