Robert Chandler

Robert Chandler is the editor of Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida and Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov and he is the author of Alexander Pushkin (in the Hesperus ‘Brief Lives’ series). His translations of Sappho and Guillaume Apollinaire are published in the series ‘Everyman’s Poetry’ and his own poems have been published in a variety of journals including the TLS. His translations from Russian include Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, Everything Flows, The Road and An Armenian Sketchbook; Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk; and Aleksander Pushkin’s Dubrovsky and The Captain’s Daughter.

Together with Olga Meerson and his wife Elizabeth he has translated a number of works by Andrey Platonov. One of these, Soul, won the 2004 AATSEEL (American Association of Teachers of Slavonic and East European Languages) prize as well as being shortlisted for the 2005 Rossica Translation Prize and the Weidenfeld European Translation Prize. His translation of Hamid Ismailov’s The Railway won the AATSEEL prize for 2007 and received a special commendation from the judges of the 2007 Rossica Translation Prize. He is currently translating more works by Vasily Grossman and Andrey Platonov, as well as co-editing a large anthology of Russian verse in translation, to be titled Russian Poetry from Pushkin to Brodsky.

Since 2004 he has worked part-time at Queen Mary, University of London, teaching classes in literature and in translation. He teaches regularly on the UyluyE translation summer school at Birkbeck College, University of London and regularly mentors younger translators under the auspices of the British Centre for LIterary Translation.