ABOUT EMMA
Emma Poliakova
1938–2018
​
​
Emma was born in Baku, Azerbaijan, and at the age of 16 travelled to Moscow to study physics. She often wrote under her maiden name Emma Khassin.
Her stories first appeared in literary magazines in Moscow in 1986 and 1987. In Russia she wrote three collections of short stories, Opportunities Missed, Who’s Travelling by Train and The Observers’ Walks, which were accepted for publishing on their first presentation by the publishing houses The Soviet Writer, The Moscow Worker and The Youthful Guards between 1986 and 1992. At that time she began writing her first screenplays A Well Balanced Tiger and Which Girl is the Best in the World?
​
The time of ‘Gorbachev’s perestroika’ and all that followed turned out to be crucial for many aspects of Russian culture, especially in the publishing business.
In 1992 Emma ‘transplanted herself’ to Melbourne, Australia, to be reunited with her only daughter. Here she worked hard to reanimate and improve her English skills, translating prose and poetry from English into Russian and vice versa. She also participated in activities of the International Women Writers’ Group, contributing her first short stories and poems in English to two of their anthologies, Turn the Page and Awakening Thoughts.
Having fallen in love at first sight with Australian drama, Emma unexpectedly and passionately wrote her plays A Yellow Plum, A Game, English Lessons, Hermes and The Passengers Are Requested... For some of these she received quite positive responses from leading theatre companies, being asked to produce subsequent drafts.
The stories collected here represent the author’s attempt to give voice to her unforgettable ‘fellow travellers’ throughout her life and her memorable ‘other cities’.
Emma continued to live in Melbourne until the time of her death in 2018.