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.

Croall, Stephen

Translator from Swedish to English, living in Stockholm.

Göransson, Johannes

Johannes Göransson, living in the US, is the coeditor of Action Books and the online quarterly Action. Göransson was a guest editor of the Winter 2006 special Swedish issue of the journal Typo, which featured substantial selections of work by major Swedish-language Modernists and contemporary poets.
He published selected translated poems by Aase Berg in 2005 and the collection Ideals Clearance by Henry Parland at Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn, NY, in 2007 and Transfer Fat by Aase Berg, and co-authored Deformation Zone: On Translation with Joyelle McSweeney.

Bakaitis, Vyt

Vyt Bakaitis, a native of Lithuania, has been living in New York City since 1968. Two books of his poems are still in print: City Country (Black Thistle Press, NYC, 1996), and Deliberate Proof (Lunar Chandelier Press, Brooklyn NY, 2010).  CON/STRUCTS, his book of visual poems and photographs, came out in a limited edition (Arunas K. Photo+Graphics, NYC, 2001).

Vyt has also published translations of poetry from several languages. His versions of the classic Romantics Hölderlin and Mickiewicz are included in World Poetry (W. W. Norton, 1998). In 1996 his versions of two early books of Lithuanian poems by Jonas Mekas, Idylls of Semeniskiai and Reminiscences, came out in a bi-lingual edition (There Is No Ithaca, Black Thistle Press). The Lithuanian Writers’ Union subsequently published two bi-lingual volumes of his selections from 20th-century Lithuanian poetry: XL Poems by Julius Keleras (1998) and the anthology Breathing Free (2001). In 2003, Daybooks 1970-1972, the second book of his translations from Mekas appeared (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, NYC).

Irons, John

John Irons (b. 1942) studied modern languages at Cambridge, where he did his doctorate on poetic imagery in the writing of a Dutch poet. He moved permanently to Scandinavia in 1968, and has lived in Denmark and Sweden ever since. He has been a professional translator from various languages into English for the past 30 years, his speciality being the translation of poetry. He also translates for the Hans Christian Andersen Centre in Odense, Denmark.