From 2012-2014, she served as co-president of the Women's National Book Association's Boston chapter. She return to Massachusetts in 2002 and since then has lived in the Boston area. In 1999, she moved to Vermont for a term position at Middlebury College, where she taught for the English department. Studying under her advisor Saul Bellow, she wrote a dissertation on the Canadian writer Mavis Gallant and graduated in 1998. In 1993, she moved to Brookline, Massachusetts to attend Boston University's Masters Program in Creative Writing and remained at Boston University to complete a PhD in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the now-defunct University Professors Program. Kalotay was raised in Madison, New Jersey and attended Vassar College. She is currently a lecturer at Princeton University. She is a citizen of both the United States and Canada. From 2014-16 she was the Visiting Writer in English at University of Massachusetts, Boston. In addition, she has taught at Middlebury College and been a writer-in-residence at Skidmore College and Lynchburg College. She is a graduate of Vassar College and holds an MA in creative writing and a PhD in literature from Boston University, where she has also taught. She is known for her novels, Russian Winter (Harper, 2010) and Sight Reading (Harper, 2013), and her collection of short stories, Calamity and Other Stories (Doubleday, 2005), which was short listed for the 2005 Story Prize. (Sept.Calamity and Other Stories, Russian Winter, Sight Readingįlorence Engel Randall Fiction Prize, Transatlantic Review Award from The Henfield Foundation, 2011 Writers' League of Texas Fiction Prizeĭaphne Kalotay is a novelist and short story writer who lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. While the Soviet-era romance can lean too much on melodrama, Kalotay turns out a mostly entrancing story thanks to a skillful depiction of artistic life behind the Iron Curtain and intriguing glimpses into auction house operations.

Meanwhile, Drew and Grigori delve into the jewelry's provenance, hoping to learn as much about the jewels as their own pasts.

In extended flashbacks, Nina recalls intimate moments and misunderstandings with her husband, happy and disturbing times with his Jewish composer best friend, and encounters with her own childhood friend. Nina likewise rebuffs inquiries from foreign language professor Grigori Solodin, who has translated the works of Nina's poet husband and who offers an additional item for auction: the amber necklace he inherited from the parents he never knew. Nina 'The Butterfly' Revskaya, 79, reveals little about the past to curious auction house representative Drew Brooks as he peruses her cache of exquisite jewelry. Kalotay makes a powerful debut with a novel about a Soviet-era prima ballerina, now retired and living in Boston, who confronts her past as she puts up for auction the jewelry she took with her when she left her husband and defected.

Russian Winter by Daphne Kalotay