Margarita Meklina is a bilingual essayist and fiction writer originally from St. Petersburg currently residing in San Francisco. In 2003, she was awarded the Andrei Bely prize for her Russian collection of short stories Battle at St. Petersburg. In 2009, she was awarded the Russian Prize, established for Russian writers living abroad by the Fund of the first Russian President Boris Yeltsin, for her manuscript My Criminal Connection to Art. Her English-language articles have appeared in The Contemporary Pacific, The Context (by Dalkey Archive), Landfall (New Zealand), and many other publications.