Author Description

Alexandra Sashe is a bilingual poet. Born in Moscow in 1976, she studied paint-ing and linguistics. In her mid-twenties she moved to Paris and began to write: at first, prose; then--as an essentialized way of living a language--poetry. The choice of language, however, was neither her mother tongue (which quickly reverted to rudiments) nor yet French (which, penetrating ever deeper into her life, would soon become her private medium of speech and her inner voice). Rather, it was the Language itself that had made its choice, as spontaneous as it seemed necessary: English. In 2013 her first collection of poems Antibodies, was published by Shearsman Books. Around the same time she moved to Austria and settled in Vienna. She dedicated the following years to studying German. Thanks to the distance from France, the French language became insulated within the intimacy of her inner world: as a result, she began to write poetry in French. Formed through a successive influence of four languages and cultures, she believes however that they come to neutralise each other. Today she names and summons her cultural identity--as well as her life--with only one word: Christian.