DANIEL WEISSBORT was born in 1935 and educated at St Paul’s School, London and at Cambridge University. In 1965, with the late Ted Hughes, he founded the journal Modern Poetry in Translation, which was published by King’s College, London University, and which he edited up to 2004. In the early 1970s he went to America, where he directed the Translation Workshop and MFA Program in Translation at the University of Iowa. His anthologies of Russian poetry and of East European poetry are well known, and he has also published many collections of his own poetry. His memoir of the late Joseph Brodsky, From Russian with Love, was published in 2004, and he is the editor of Ted Hughes’ Selected Translations and co-editor of a Historical Reader in Translation Studies (OUP 2005). Daniel Weissbort is a Professor (Emeritus) of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa and Honorary Professor in the Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick.
VALENTINA POLUKHINA is married to Daniel Weissbort. She was born in Siberia and educated at Kemerovo, Tula and Moscow universities. Between 1962 and 1973 she taught at Moscow Lumumba University and from 1973 to 2001 she was Professor at Keele University, England. In addition to her publications on poets such as Akhmatova, Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Khlebnikov and Mandelshtam, Valentina Polukhina is the author and editor of major studies of Brodsky, including Joseph Brodsky: A Poet for Our Time (1989); Brodsky Through the Eyes of his Contemporaries (1992); Brodskii glazami sovremennikov (1997, 2005); A Dictionary of Brodsky’s Tropes (1995); Joseph Brodsky: The Art of a Poem (1999); Brodsky as a Critic (2000); Kak rabotaet stikhotvorenie Brodskogo (2002) and Joseph Brodsky: Bolshaya kniga intervyu (2000, 2005).
Valentina Polukhina has a particular interest in bringing living Russian literature to English audiences. She has organised the visits of many Russian writers and poets to Keele and other English universities. The post of Russian Poet in Residence at the University of Keele, as well as the Russian Poets’ Fund, were established thanks to her efforts.