Born in Moscow on 26 December 1949, she graduated in philology from Moscow State University in 1973, specialising in Old Slavic literature. A university lecturer, she began by publishing critical essays and translations of European poets. She is among the most impressive voices in contemporary Russian poetry. For a long time, her poems only spread in the USSR through the samizdat. After perestroika, numerous volumes of his works appeared, simultaneously translated into various languages, including English, German, Hebrew and Italian. She has received numerous awards in Russia and abroad, including important literary prizes in Paris (1991), in Rome (1996), the Vladimir Solov’ëv Prize in the Vatican (1996), an honorary degree from the Theological Faculty of the University of Minsk (February 2003), the Solženicyn Prize, awarded in May 2003, and the Composampiero Prize for Religious Poetry (December 2010).