Name David McDuff | Books Words in nature | |
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Similar People Constance Garnett, Gosta Agren, Isaak Babel, Geir Kjetsaa, Cynthia Ozick | ||
Education University of Edinburgh | ||
David McDuff (born 1945, Sale, Cheshire, England) is a British translator, editor and literary critic.
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Life
He attended the University of Edinburgh, where he studied Russian and German. He married mathematician Dusa McDuff, but they separated in around 1975. After living for some time in the Soviet Union, Denmark, Iceland, and the United States, he eventually settled in 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. McDuff’s translation of the Finnish-language author Tuomas Kyrö’s 2011 novel The Beggar and the Hare was published in 2014.
Among literary awards, he has received the 1994 TLS/George Bernard Shaw Translation Prize for his translation of 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.
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.
McDuff was honoured with the Finnish State Award for Foreign Translators in 2013.