Valentina Polukhina

Valentina Polukhina (Russian: Валентина Платоновна Полухина; born 18 June 1936) is a British-Russian scholar, Emeritus Professor at Keele University, and the widow of Daniel Weissbort. She is the recipient of the A. C. Benson Medal and the Medal of Pushkin.
Biography.
Valentina Polukhina was born in Siberia and educated at Kemerovo, Tula and Moscow universities. From 1962 to 1973 she taught at Moscow's Lumumba University and from 1973 till 2001 was Professor at Keele University, England.
She is the author and editor of major studies of Joseph Brodsky, as well as publications on poets such as Akhmatova, Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Khlebnikov and Mandelshtam. She has a particular interest in bringing living Russian literature to English audiences, organising the visits of many Russian writers and poets to Keele and other English universities. The post of Russian Poet in Residence at the University of Keele, as well as the Russian Poets Fund, were established thanks to her efforts.
In 1995 Professor Valentina Polukhina together with her colleagues of the Russian Department at Keele University established The Russian Poets Fund in order to invite Russian poets to the British Universities. The patrons of the fund were HRH Prince Michael of Kent, The Rt. Revd. Keith, Bishop of Lichfield and Seamus Heaney (Nobel Laureate). After Prof. Polukhina’s retirement in 2001 she and her husband Prof. Daniel Weissbort run the Fund. Together they compiled and edited "The Anthology of Russian Women Poets" (2002) and invited several Russian women poets to present it at The Poetry International, London, 2002. Due to Prof. Weissbort’s illness The Fund ceased to exist in 2012. In December 2014 with a help of a poet Olga Shvarova The Russian Poets Fund was brought back to life. Baron Rowan Williams and a Sir Andrew Motion, a former Poet-laureate of UK, agreed to replace Seamus Heaney and The Rt. Revd. Keith, Bishop of Lichfield, who have passed away.
More recently V. Polukhina has completed "The Anthology of Poems Dedicated to Joseph Brodsky", under the title “Iz nezabyvshikh menia” (“By those who remember me”) which include sixteen British and two Irish poets.
In 2014 she was awarded the A. C. Benson Medal by the Royal Society of Literature and 2018 Medal of Pushkin for the service to Russian and British culture and for the study and preservation of cultural heritage.