Sergey  Stratanovsky was born in 1944 in Leningrad and educated in the department of Russian philology at Leningrad University. He began to write poetry in 1968, around the time of the Prague Spring and his graduation, though his early work subsisted in a culture of Soviet Union censorship. During this period Stratanovsky was part of Russia’s underground literary culture, and he co-edited the samizdat magazines Dialog and Obvodny Kanal (Bypass Canal ). With the relaxation of censorship following the Perestroika reforms in the 1980s Stratanovsky’s work gained a wider public readership. Since 1993 he has authored twelve collections of poems, and his work has been translated into Bulgarian, Chechen, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, Hebrew, Italian, German, Lithuanian, Polish, and Swedish. In 2000 he was awarded the inaugural Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship.