The Books That Spoke

Lydia Nikolaevna Grigorieva was born in Ukraine, spent her early childhood in the Far North, completed her secondary education in Luhansk, and received her higher philological education at Kazan University. She lived in Moscow for many years, working in literature as a freelancer. In the 1980s, she was the author and host of literary programs Poetic Meetings and Poet’s Workshop on All- Union Radio. In the 1990s, together with Russian television, she created the TV films Tsvetaeva in London, Gumilyov in London, Scriabin in London, The Dreams of Vera Pavlovna, and others. She is the author of many poetry books and two novels in verse: Circle of Communication and The Russian Wife of an English Gentleman. She has received several literary awards.

She is the creator of synthetic, border genres with poetry: Photo Poetry and Cinema Poem. Her personal photo exhibitions from the series Monet Mania, Watermarks, Venetian Mirages were held in London, Moscow, Kazan, and Venice. Lydia Grigorieva’s Cinema Poem Kandinsky’s Ocean received a Diploma at the SIFFA-2018 International Film Festival in Sochi “For Visualizing Poetry in Cinema.” On this topic, she held a masterclass at the SIFFA-2017 film festival and gave a lecture at the "Literature and Cinema" congress of the Dostoevsky Foundation in Sosny, Moscow Region (2016). Her new cinema-poem Angels of Light became an Art Event at the SIFFA-2025 Film Festival in London.

Her new poetry book Phantom of Love was named one of the best poetry books by the jury of the Nonfiction-25 Fair. She is also the author of a three-volume short prose collection The Novel in Strokes: Termitnik 1, 2, 3 (2020−2025), which was declared by some critics as a "mega novel" and "an encyclopedia of modern post-Soviet life."

In 2025, Lydia Grigorieva became a Laureate of the WOW-25 World Writers' Organization, receiving the Gold Medal "For the Fire of the Russian Word, Preserved in Every Line and Gifted to the World." She has lived in Moscow and London since 1994.