Marijeta Bozovic Wins Modern Language Association Book Prize

Marijeta Bozovic, Professor of Slavic Languages & Literatures and of Film and Media Studies, was named a co-winner of the 9th Matei Calinescu Prize by the Modern Language Association of America for her book Avant-Garde Post–: Radical Poetics after the Soviet Union (Harvard University Press, 2023).

The Matei Calinescu Prize is awarded annually by the MLA to recognize a “distinguished work of scholarship” in 20th- or 21st-century literature and thought. It was established in 2016 in honor of Matei Calinescu, a Romanian poet and scholar who taught at Indiana University, Bloomington. The prize is one of twenty-three awards that will be presented in January 2025 at the association’s annual convention.

The selection committee for the award called Bozovic’s book an “eye-opening and richly documented profile of leftist poets in post-Soviet Russia,” and praised Bozovic as an “astute analyst, a master storyteller, and an engaging companion in a wise book that reads with the breathless intensity of someone raising the curtain on a suppressed culture of resistance.”

Avant-Garde Post– explores the state of leftist art in the wake of state socialism.  Marijeta Bozovic follows a constellation of Russian-language avant-garde poets at the center of a contemporary literary movement committed to explicitly political poetry.