After being awarded the Sneath Poetry Prize by Robert Lowell in 1960, Richard Lourie published his first book of poems My Only Crime a prompt 64 years later. He had been waylaid by Russia. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, three of his grandparents and his father were born in the Russian empire, though no Russian, except for the occasional curse, was spoken at home. But tales of Russian life stimulated him sufficiently to get a Ph.D.in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Berkeley. He would go on to translate more than thirty books from Russian and Polish, including Visions From San Francisco Bay by Czeslaw Milosz, Memoirs by Andrei Sakharov, The Life And Extraordinary Adventures Of Private Ivan Chonkin by Vladimir Voinovich, and My Century by Aleksander Wat. He has published eleven books of his own, including the novels The Autobiography Of Joseph Stalin, Zero Gravity, First Loyalty and A Hatred For Tulips. Among his non-fiction works are Sakharov: A Biography, Putin: His Downfall And Russia’s Coming Crash, Hunting The Devil (a true-crime account of a Russian serial killer) and Russia Speaks: An Oral History From The Revolution To The Present. He is currently at work on a second book of poems which he intends to finish in half the time it took him for his first.