Blackwell’s Manchester are delighted to welcome Maria Stepanova to Blackwell’s to hear her discuss her latest novel, The Disappearing Act, described by Lea Ypi as “a profound, unsettling meditation on political exile and reinvention after the rupture of belonging.”

Maria will be in conversation with James Daviss.

Doors: 6.30pm, Starts: 6.45pm.

General admission is £5 or included within the price of a Book & Ticket option.

About the Book:

The writer known as M. is living in exile while her home country wages war on a neighbouring state. Wracked by shame and severed from her language, M. finds herself unable to write, unmoored in a present where the future feels unknowable. When she travels to a nearby country for an event, a twist of fate leaves her stranded in an unfamiliar city, phoneless and untraceable.

In this rupture, she feels a flicker of liberation – the possibility of starting over – but memories of childhood, books, films and tarot cards pull her back, the last fragments of a vanishing world. Then she meets a troupe of circus performers who invite her to join them. For a moment, reinvention seems within reach.

Oscillating between reality and dream, written in rich, hypnotic prose, The Disappearing Act is a haunting meditation on identity, language and the fragile desire to disappear by Maria Stepanova, one of Russia’s greatest living writers.

‘The Disappearing Act, like its prot­ag­on­ist – a woman with a suit­case but nowhere to go, a phone but no one to call, belong­ings but no plans to stay – is itin­er­ant, whim­sical, dis­turb­ing, bru­tal and, yes, beau­ti­ful. It informs us that, some­times, it is bet­ter to des­troy your­self than to carry on as if everything were the same.”

– Declan Fry, Sydney Morning Herald

About the author:

Maria Stepanova is a poet, essayist, journalist and the author of ten poetry collections and three books of essays. She has received several Russian and international literary awards (including the prestigious Andrey Bely Prize and Joseph Brodsky Fellowship). In Memory of Memory won Russia’s Bolshaya Kniga Award in 2018. Sasha Dugdale’s English translation was awarded the Berman Literature Prize and was also shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation and the James Tait Black Prize for Biography. In 2022 she was awarded the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding 2023 for a book of poetry, Mädchen ohne Kleider (Girls Without Clothes).

She founded and was editor-in-chief of the online independent crowd-sourced journal Colta.ru, which engaged with the cultural, social and political reality of contemporary Russia until the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine when all dissenting media in Russia were forced to shut down. As a prominent critic of Putin’s regime, she had to leave Russia and is now living in exile.