Robertson, Ritchie

Ritchie Robertson (born 1952) is emeritus fellow of Queen's College, University of Oxford, where he was the Taylor Professor of German Language and Literature between 2010 and 2021.

He was educated at Nairn Academy in the North of Scotland and at Edinburgh University, where he took two degrees, in English and German. From 2000 to 2010 he was Germanic Editor of The Modern Language Review. His first book was Kafka: Judaism, Politics, and Literature (1985) and he has co-directed the Oxford Kafka Research Centre.
His most recent publication is The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness 1680-1790 (London 2020; New York 2021).

Volumes on Kafka and Goethe have been widely spread in OUP’s Very Short Introductions series, and his translations of Hoffmann, Heine, Moritz and Kafka have been published in the Oxford World’s Classics and Penguin Classics.

Juers, Evelyn

Evelyn Juers is a critic, essayist and biographer, and co-founder of the Australian publishing house Giramondo and the literary magazine HEAT.

Born 1950 in northern Germany, she grew up in Hamburg and Sydney, and wrote her PhD on Emily Brontë and Wuthering Heights at the University of Essex in the UK. Her collective biography House of Exile - the Life and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann (2008) won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award in 2009. It was published in the USA (FSG), UK (Penguin), France (Autrement), Spain (Circe), and Italy (Bompiani).

Hawkins, Hildi

Hildi Hawkins is a writer, editor and translator living in London.
She has co-edited or co-written a wide variety of books, including Ireland: The Rough Guide (1996), Helsinki: A Literary Companion (Suomalaisen kirjallisuuden seura, 2001), Finland: A Cultural Encyclopedia (Finnish Literature Society Editions, 2000), and The Phantom Museum: And Henry Wellcome's collection of medical curiosities: Henry Wellcome's Medical Mysteries (Profile Book, 2003). She translated Jaan Kaplinski’s collection Through the Forest (The Harvill Press, 1996), much of which is included in his Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2011). She is also the editor of things, a journal of writings about objects, their pasts, presents and futures.

McDuff, David

David McDuff (born 1945, Sale, Cheshire, England) is a Scottish translator, editor and literary critic.
McDuff attended the University of Edinburgh, where he studied Russian and German, gaining a PhD in 1971. In 1968 he married mathematician Dusa McDuff, but they separated around 1975. After living for some time in the Soviet Union, Denmark, Iceland, and the United States, he eventually returned to the United Kingdom, where he worked for several years as a co-editor and reviewer on the literary magazine Stand. He then moved to London, where he began his career as a literary translator.
McDuff's translations include both foreign poetry and prose, including poems by Joseph Brodsky and Tomas Venclova, and novels including Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and The Idiot (all three in Penguin Classics). His Complete Poems of Edith Södergran (1984, 1992) and Complete Poems of Karin Boye (1994) were published by Bloodaxe Books. One of the earliest members of SELTA in 1982, he later served on its committee. McDuff’s translation of the Finnish-language author Tuomas Kyrö’s 2011 novel The Beggar and the Hare was published in 2014. In November 2019 McDuff's new translation of Karin Boye's dystopian novel Kallocain was published by Penguin Classics. There is a complete list of McDuff's published translations at http://englishings.com/publicat.htm
From 2007 to 2010 David McDuff worked as an editor and translator with Prague Watchdog, the Prague-based NGO which monitored and discussed human rights abuses in Chechnya and the North Caucasus.
Among literary awards, he has received the 1994 TLS/George Bernard Shaw Translation Prize for his translation of Finland-Swedish poet Gösta Ågren's poems, A Valley In The Midst of Violence, published by Bloodaxe, and the 2006 Stora Pris of the Finland-Swedish Writers' Association (Finlands svenska författareförening), Helsinki. McDuff was honoured with the Finnish State Award for Foreign Translators in 2013 and the Swedish Academy's Interpretation prize in 2021.

Kernan, Helena

Helena Kernan holds MA degrees in Slavic Studies from the University of Cambridge and UC Berkeley, and works as a literary translator, writer and researcher. Originally from the UK, she has lived in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kyiv and Berlin, where she worked with the State Hermitage Museum, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, the Theatre of Displaced People, and the Ukrainian Centre for Civil Liberties. She has spent time in Perm, Russia, volunteering for the human rights organisation Memorial, and has worked on several international projects focused on historical memory, documentation, and witness.
Her translation work is rooted in contemporary feminist poetry in the Russophone world, and in 2020 she was chosen as the inaugural Translator of Contemporary Russian Poetry in Residence by Pushkin House and Oxford University.

Graham, Fiona

Fiona Graham was born in Hereford, England, but has Scottish and Welsh roots. She studied German and French at the Universities of Oxford and Tübingen, followed by linguistics at Reading University.

Her translation career began at the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs (The Hague). Successive posts in the translation departments of the European Parliament (Luxembourg) and the European Commission (Brussels) then enabled her to extend her repertoire of languages to include Swedish, Danish, Spanish and Portuguese.

She has served as reviews editor at the Swedish Book Review since 2014 and is currently (in 2021) working on her fifth book translation from Swedish, Torill Kornfeldt’s Människan i provröret. Her translation of Elisabeth Åsbrink’s 1947 was longlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation (2018) and the JQ Wingate Literary Prize (2019). Fiona has a particular interest in literature that exposes injustice and explores human rights issues.