Milena Makarova is a Latvian poetess, essayist, journalist, and translator from Riga. Milena studied at the University of Latvia in Riga. She is the author of five volumes of prose and verse translations from Latvian into Russian. She writes her own original material in Russian, her latest anthology of verse being Новая мифология (A New Mythology). Her poems and translations have been published in numerous countries including Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine, Germany, and Israel.

Milena is a member of numerous writers’ unions, and of PEN Latvia.

Milena and I met by chance, when she participated in an anti-war poetry event in Pushkin House, London, into which I dialled via Zoom.

In October 2024 we presented five of her poems in bilingual tandem at the Zhukovsky Poetry Festival in Tartu, and followed up shortly afterwards with an interview on Latvian Radio 4 in which we read two of ‘The Tartu Five’.

Here is a link to the Latvian Radio broadcast.

Here is a link to two poems and my translations in the Los Angeles Review.