Natalya Evgenyevna Gorbanevskaya - Russian poet, translator, human rights defender, participant in the dissident movement in the USSR, first editor of the uncensored bulletin of the human rights movement Chronicle of Current Events - was born on 26 May 1936 in Moscow.

In 1964 Natalya Gorbanevskaya graduated from Leningrad University in philology and teaching Russian language and literature. She then worked in Moscow as a librarian, a bibliographer, a technical and scientific translator. She was also a founder, editor and typist of the first issue of the samizdat bulletin Chronicle of Current Events.

Natalya Gorbanevskaya was a participant in the famous demonstration on Red Square in Moscow on 25 August 1968 against the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet forces.

She was arrested on 24 December 1969. In April 1970 she was diagnosed by the Serbsky Institute of Forensic Psychiatry as having “subacute schizophrenia”, although there was no mention in the clinical notes by the forensic experts of any psychological disorders at all, that would have justified hospitalization. She was subjected to forced treatment in a psychiatric prison-hospital where she was kept until 22 February 1972.

Shusha Guppy dedicated her song ‘Natalia’, written in 1973, to her. This song was made popular by Joan Baez, who included the song in her album From Every Stage, 1976.

In 1971 Natalya Gorbanevskaya published an article ‘Free Medical Assistance’, written in March 1968 and dedicated to the abuse of psychiatry in the USSR, in the book Punished by Madness.

Natalia Gorbanevskaya emigrated on 17 December 1975 and went to live in Paris. There she worked as an editor on the journal Kontinent, and as a freelance journalist with Radio Svoboda. From the early 1980s until 2003 she worked for the newspaper Russkaya mysl. Since 1999 she has been an editor and a member of the editorial board of the Russian-language, Warsaw-based journal Novaya Polsha, publishing in this journal as both author and translator.

Since 2005 she has been a Polish citizen. She is author of more than a dozen books of verse; and publishes translations from Polish, Czech, Slovak and French.

On 23 October 2008 Natalya Gorbanevskaya was awarded an honorary doctorate (doctor honoris causa) by the Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin.

Natalya Gorbanevskaya’s poetry has been translated into English by Gerald Smith and Daniel Weissbort, into Polish by Viktor Voroshilsky, Stanislav Baranchak, and Adam Pomorsky, into German by Kai Borovsky, into French by Véronique Schiltz, Georges Nivat, and Christine Zeytounian-Belous, into Czech by Milan Dvořák, and into Ukrainian by Valeriya Boguslavskaya.