She is the founder of Colta, the only independent crowd-funded source of information in Russia. The high-traffic online publication has been called a Russian Huffington Post in format and style, and has also been compared to The New York Review of Books for the scope and depth of its long essays.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/mad-russia-hurt-me-into-...
The website is also mentioned in the OP article.
How about Russian branch of Wikipedia?
What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
It's completely up to the authorities to define great writers?
I'll add to your point that 'stars and badges' (from a source I trust) on something I don't like can be a signal that there is something more there, outside my understanding, and that's often the most fruitful thing to read.
And the third question is, how is she on the front page? Are there that many readers of Hacker News who are interested in contemporary Russian poetry?