Nastassja Martin in Conversation with Sophie R. Lewis

Join for an evening in conversation with Nastassja Martin on her new book, East of Dreams in London with Sophie R. Lewis

The French anthropologist Natassja Martin’s new book East of Dreams is a record of her seven years spent among the Even people of the Kamchatka Peninsula in the Russian Far East. Dispossessed of their reindeer herds during the Soviet era, the Evens were, like many indigenous peoples, resettled on collective farms until the fall of the USSR. East of Dreams centres on a single family, led by their matriarch, Daria, who decided to refuse those terms, returning to the forests of Kamchatka during the final years of the Soviet Union, and to a self-sustained life of fishing, hunting, and gathering. There, along the river Icha, they have managed to preserve a way of life antithetical to the enforced urban modernity to which so many of their compatriots were made subject.

Martin’s previous research has centered on animism and some of the largest questions of humanity’s relationship with nature. In her fieldwork (she has also lived among indigenous Alaskans, on the opposite side of the Bering Strait), Martin seeks the deepest involvement with the peoples whom she studies. East of Dreams is her most ambitious work yet, a moving collective portrait of the Evens’ fight to reclaim their autonomy and an expressive depiction of the force, beauty, and mystery of the natural world. The book is also an engaging work of natural history about a place where many of the central ecological and political issues of our time—colonial extraction, climate catastrophe, land contestation—collide. From her years with the Evens, Martin has composed a powerful study of a people’s struggle to recover their identity and, in so doing, learn to dream anew.

Nastassja Martin is a French author and anthropologist who has studied the Gwich'in people of Alaska and the Even people of the Kamchatka Peninsula. Her books include In the Eye of the Wild (available from New York Review Books), Les Ames sauvages: Face à l'Occident, la résistance d'un peuple d'Alaska (winner of the Prix Louis Castex of the Académie Française), and, most recently, Lamont des sources. In 2023 she became professor of Habitabilité de la Terre et transitions justes at the University of Paris 1/Sorbonne, and she is the director of Tvaian, a documentary based on the experiences of Daria, one of the subjects of East of Dreams.

Sophie R. Lewis is an editor and a translator from the French and Portuguese. Her translation of Noémi Lefebvre's Blue Self-Portrait was short-listed for both the Scott Moncrieff Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Prize in 2018, and her translation of Nastassja Martin's In the Eye of the Wild was a winner of the nonfiction translation prize from the French-American Foundation in 2022.