Bilingual essayist and fiction writer Margarita Meklina was born in Leningrad and shares her life between Dublin, Ireland, and the San Francisco Bay Area. Meklina is an author of six books in Russian (two of them in collaboration with Lida Yusupova and Arkadii Dragomoshchenko) and two, the YA novel The Little Gaucho Who Loved Don Quixote, and a collection of short stories A Sauce Stealer, in English. Meklina’s awards include the Andrei Bely Prize (2003), the Yeltsin Center’s Russian Prize (2008), the Aldanov Literary Prize (2018) and the Norton Girault Literary Prize’s Honorable Mention (2019). With Anne Fisher, she co-curated “Life Stories, Death Sentences,” a folio of LGBTQ+ literature translated from Russian and, together with The Brooklyn Rail/In Translation, facilitated a multilingual reading in New York City, to coincide with the 50th Anniversary of Stonewall riots.