Yoel Matveyev is a Yiddish poet, writer, journalist and translator, currently based in St. Petersburg (Russia).

Yoel Matveyev

Born in 1976 in Leningrad, he mastered Yiddish while he was in high school. In the late 1990s, he moved to the Hasidic quarters of London, and later New York, where the population speaks Yiddish in everyday life, and studied in Yiddish-speaking yeshivas. In 2002, he started working on the editorial board of the New York Yiddish newspaper Forverts (Yiddish Forward), regularly publishing articles, translating news into Yiddish from a number of languages, and writing weekly columns on religious and popular science topics. In 2017 he moved back to Russia. His works are regularly published in the Russian-Yiddish newspaper Birobidzhaner Shtern.

Matveyev writes in Yiddish, Russian and English. He is fluent in Esperanto, Hebrew and Aramaic, and has good knowledge of Irish, Persian, French and several other languages. Since 2002, his poems and translations have been published in a number of American, Russian and Israeli publications. He translated into Yiddish such poets as Osip Mandelstam, William Butler Yeats and Tomas Venclova, as well as many Soviet pop songs, some of which have been performed in his Yiddish translation on television. He started publishing Yiddish science fiction in 2006. Since then he has written a number of works in this genre, including short stories, theater plays and one short novel.