PRESS RELEASE
June, 20, 2011

We are very pleased to announce the 2011 Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship Fund poetry and art fellowships. The new poetry fellow will be poet Dmitry Vedenyapin. The new art fellow will be Dmitry Kaminker.

Dmitry Vedenyapin was born October, 14, 1958, in Moscow. He graduated from Moscow State Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages. His works were published only outside the USSR during the Soviet era, but since 1987 his poetry was have been published in numerous magazines including “Oktyabr”, « Novy mir», “Znamya”, “Novaya Yunost”, “Postscriptum”, and many others. Vedenyapin is the author of four poetry collections. He won the Big Moscow Score Poetry Prize in 2010 for the book “Mezhdu shkafom I nebom” (“Between the wardrobe and the sky”). His poems have been translated into English. The other important part of Vedenyapin’s work is translation. He is widely recognized as a translator of both poetry and fiction from English (Michael Cunningham, Bruce Chatwin, Arthur Miller, etc.), French and German.

Dmitry Kaminker was born in 1949 in Leningrad. From 1969 until 1973 he studied at the Mukhina Art College in the Architectural and Decorative Sculpture Department. Dmitry Kaminker is the creative leader of the “Shuvalovo-Ozerki” group of artists and a founding member of the KruKaKo sculptural international alliance. From 1980 he is a member of the Russian Union of Artists. In 1994-1999 he served as a committee member for the Presidential National Art Prize. In 1993 he was N.Punin Prize-winner of Art Critics of Saint-Petersburg. In 2005 he won Diaghilev Art Prize (St. Petersburg) and also became a laureate of the International Art Festival “Master-class” St. Petersburg in 2007. Now he is a permanent participant of project "Artist's village", St. Petersburg, Russia. Dmitry Kaminker is an acknowledged master, the bearer of deep cultural traditions. He uses classical method of three-dimensional thinking together with new awareness of the form.

Both fellows will serve a two months fellowship in Rome and Venice during the fall of the year 2011.

Both fellowships are made possible by generous gifts from Mr. Mikhail Prokhorov, chairman of “Polyus Gold” Company and President of ONEXIM Group and Trust for Mutual Understanding.

Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship Fund is also pleased to announce the publication of an anthology of the works of former Brodsky Fund fellows this spring (“New Literary Review” Publishing House, Moscow), edited by Claudia Scandura of the University of Rome.

Joseph Brodsky was a Nobel laureate in literature and a distinguished poet in his native Russia as well as his second home in the West. In the fall of 1995 he made an appeal to the mayor of Rome that a Russian Academy in Rome be established, to allow Russian artists, writers, and scholars periods of work and study in Italy. He urged that seventy years of isolation under communist rule had broken a much older tradition of cultural exchange between Russia and her European neighbors; he wished to revive this tradition with the creation of an independent academy devoted to literature, culture, and scholarship. As he wrote to the mayor, "Italy was a revelation to the Russians; now it can become the source of their renaissance."

When he died in 1996 his vision was taken up by a group of his friends, who set up foundations in the US and Italy to realize it.

The Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship Fund is funded by private donation and independent foundations. We are most grateful to our donors for giving Mr. Brodsky's vision this continuing life.

For more information, please contact:
Ann Kjellberg, New York
(212) 645 3346