Ruth Fainlight FRSL (born 2 May 1931) is an American-born poet, short story writer, translator and librettist based in the United Kingdom.

Life and career

Ruth Fainlight was born in New York, but has mainly lived in Britain since she was 15, having also spent some years living in France and Spain. She studied for two years at the Birmingham and Brighton Colleges of Art. In addition to her own works, Fainlight has also provided criticism for BBC Radio, The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian and numerous other publications. Fainlight was married to the British writer Alan Sillitoe (1928–2010) and has a son, David, who is a photographer for The Guardian, and an adopted daughter, Susan. Fainlight lives in London. Fainlight has twice been Poet in Residence at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, and was a close friend of Sylvia Plath in the years leading up to Plath's death.

Publications

Poetry collections

Books

Short story collections

Translations

Poetry collections in translation

trans. M. Rosenberg & D. Samoilovich, Cosmopoetica, Cordoba, Spain

Poems in translation

The poem "Sugar-Paper Blue" was translated into Russian by Marina Boroditskaya and is published in the April 2003 issue of the Moscow monthly Inostrannaya Literatura (Foreign Literature). The poem sequence "Sheba and Solomon" has been translated into Russian by Marina Boroditskaya and published in Moscow in the literary magazine Novaya Younost in 2003.

Libretti

Awards and honours