Marina Stepnova

Marina Lvovna Stepnova (née Rovner; born 2 September 1971, in Yefremov) is a Russian writer and poet, best known for her books Women of Lazarus (2011), which won the Big Book Award, and was nominated for the Russian Booker Prize and the Yasnaya Polyana Literary Award in 2012, and The Garden (2020), which won the Yasnaya Polyana Literary Award in 2021.

Biography
She was born in Tula Oblast, in the family of a military man and a doctor. In 1981, the family settled in Chisinau. There, in 1988, she graduated from high school and entered the Moldova State University, where she studied the first three courses at the Faculty of Philology. She then transferred to the Translation Department of the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow. A future Romanian translator left the university and a replacement was urgently needed. They came to Chisinau to look for such a candidate, as Moldovan and Romanian languages are identical, and in the end they chose Marina. She graduated in 1994. In postgraduate studies at the Gorky Institute of World Literature she studied the works of Alexander Sumarokov.

She started writing poetry at the age of 16 and wrote her first short story at the age of 23.

She worked for a high-fashion magazine. Since 2017 she has been teaching literature at the Master's programme at the Faculty of Humanities at Higher School of Economics. She has also worked as a screenwriter.