Richard McKane UK

Richard McKane was born in 1947 and read Russian at Oxford, his Selected Poems of Anna Akhmatova (Penguin / OUP) appearing in 1969. He lived in Turkey for six years in the 1970s, working on an archaeological dig in Kandahar, Afghanistan for some of this time. In 1978 he was awarded the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University where he met his former wife Elizabeth, with whom he later he brought out Mandelstam's Moscow and Voronezh Notebooks. For over eighteen years, he worked as an interpreter from, and into, Turkish and Russian at the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture. As a translator, Richard McKane, working with Ruth Christie, brought out two selections of Oktay Rifat's work, Voices of Memory and Poems and, with Tâlat Halman, Beyond the Walls: Poems of Nâzým Hikmet. He also translated the work of Nikolai Gumilyov, Olga Sedakova, Aronzon and Larissa Miller, whose full-length collection, Guests of Eternity and two chapbooks, Regarding the Next big Occasion and Fate's Little Pictures are published by Arc. As a poet, he had two bilingual books published in Turkey, Turkey Poems and Coffee House Poems, and a selection, Amphora for Metaphors in New York. Richard McKane died in 2016.