Alexandra Sashe

Alexandra Sashe is a poet and translator. She was born in 1976 in Moscow, where she studied painting, linguistics and literature. Having moved to France in her mid-twenties, she settled in Paris - the city where she would spend her most formative years and which would mark the beginning of her creative quest. At first, prose; then - as an essentialized way of living a language - poetry. However, neither French (which soon became her second language) nor her mother tongue (which progressively...See more

Alexandra Sashe is a poet and translator. She was born in 1976 in Moscow, where she studied painting, linguistics and literature. Having moved to France in her mid-twenties, she settled in Paris - the city where she would spend her most formative years and which would mark the beginning of her creative quest. At first, prose; then - as an essentialized way of living a language - poetry. However, neither French (which soon became her second language) nor her mother tongue (which progressively returned to rudiments) ever gave as much as a single line. The choice of the language (or rather, it was the Language that made its choice - for it is not the smaller that chooses the greater) was as spontaneous as it was necessary: English. Starting from 2008, she focused exclusively on poetry, sharing her life - as yet more on the spiritual and emotive than on the geographical level - between Paris and Vienna. Her literary studies, the intensity of her cultural environment and the disparity between the two cities, as well as the influence of several languages, shaped her poetics. The fruits of this period of her life are - apart from many publications in the UK and Europe - a bilingual (French-English) selection Ver Sacrum, and a full collection of poems that covers the most intense years of her life in Paris, Antibodies. Having closed this chapter, Alexandra Sashe recently moved to Vienna where she lives with her husband. See less