Dr Olga Kenton

• PhD in Creative Writing, University of Birmingham
• BA/MA in Creative Writing, Maxim Gorky Literature Institute, Moscow

I have joined the Department of Modern Languages in 2019. In 2024, I received a Fellowship in Higher Education from Advance HE. As a prose writer and journalist, I have interviewed and published articles with leading Russian and Russian-speaking filmmakers, theatre directors, actors, writers, and artists and taught Creative Writing Foundation modules to UG students at the Department of Film and Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham. My main publications include interviews with Andrey Zvyagintsev, Nikolas Pasternak-Slater, Marianna Yarovskaya, Dolya Gavanski, Diana Vishneva, a Formula 1 driver Daniil Kvyat, novels At the Edge of the World, The Girl from the House on Embankment and Gorillas in Green.

• I am currently teaching a range of undergraduate modules in the Department of Modern Languages.
• I co-lecture the Prose Fiction in the Department of Film and Creative Writing.
• I supervise dissertations and creative projects for MA in Digital Media and Creative Industries, as well as Independent Study Modules (ISM).

I am a specialist in creative writing and Russian émigré literature. My doctoral thesis, entitled “The Silent Voices of Russian Immigration (creative portion) and A Chorus Of Voices: Narrative Strategies For Representing Russian Émigré Voices in Gaito Gazdanov’s Night Roads, Sergei Dovlatov’s A Foreign Woman, Zinovy Zinik’s At Home Abroad And Olga Kenton’s The Silent Voices Of Russian Immigration (critical portion),” was a practice-based research project that explored the representation of voices of Russian immigrants in émigré literature and creative nonfiction. The creative portion of my thesis was published under a new title, The England We Know: Russian Voices Abroad (2025).

My current research focuses on translingualism, creative writing and interviewing.

• Deputy Director of Undergraduate studies in Modern Languages (2025/2026) 
• Joint Honours Tutor in Modern Languages (2025/26)

Examples of recent talks and conference participation

• Paper, “Going Beyond Boundaries: Ethics and Emotions of Immigrant Testimonial Writing.” Forum “Losing Citizenship: Autoethnographic, Testimonial and Ethnographic Reflections,” University of Ss. Cyril and Methodius (UKIM), Skopje, North Macedonia (March, 2026).
• Paper, “Transcending Genres: How Russophone Authors Intermingle Social Media Posts, Journalistic Material, and Documents in Their Narrative.” Workshop “Writing Back from the Peripheries? Russophone Literary Diversity” (July 2025)
• Paper, “Narrating the life of migrants in the UK” (CREES seminar, March 2025)
• Interpreter from Russian to English for Dr Isobel Palmer’s interview with the poet Ramil Nyazov (Langueflow, January 2025)
• Paper, “Beyond the Mother Tongue: Translingual and Exophonic Writing in Zinovy Zinik’s Mind the Doors and Lara Vapnyar’s Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love.” Symposium on Russophone Literary Diversity, University of Birmingham (September 2024)

Other contribution

• Co-author (Kenton, Rulyova), MA Russian for Postgraduate Researchers, Oxford School of Global and Area Studies (2022/23)

Memberships and professional associations

• British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies [BASEES]
• National Association of Writers in Education [NAWE]