Dr Olga Kenton

• BA/MA in Creative Writing, Maxim Gorky Literature Institute, Moscow

I joined the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Birmingham in 2019. In 2021 I received an Associate Teaching Fellowship in Higher Education from Advance HE. 

As a PhD student at the Department of Film and Creative Writing, University of Birmingham, I am currently working on my creative non-fiction project that explores the life experiences of Russian immigrants in the UK. As a prose writer and journalist, I have interviewed and published articles with leading Russian and Russian-speaking filmmakers, theatre directors, writers, and artists and has 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, Dolya Gavanski, Nikolas Pasternak-Slater, Marianna Yarovskaya, novels At the edge of the world, The girl from the house on embankment and Gorillas in green).

As a specialist in Russian at all levels, I developed and delivered the Business Russian module to final-year UG students and taught a range of Russian undergraduate modules. I have additionally taught the postgraduate Reading Russian for Researchers module; I have organised and run Russian-language Creative Writing and Russian Journalism clubs for UG students.