About Us

JULIA SHERWOOD was born and grew up in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia (now the Slovak Republic). After studying English and Slavonic languages and literature in Cologne, London and Munich she settled in the UK. She spent more than 20 years working in the NGO sector, travelling widely in Central and Eastern Europe and the former USSR. From 2008 to 2014 she lived in North Carolina, and since 2008 has been working as a freelance translator from Slovak, Czech, Polish, Russian and German into English (with Peter Sherwood), as well as into Slovak. In addition to book-length publications, her work has appeared in Two LinesBODY.LiteratureThe Missing Slate, Words Without BordersOpenDemocracy, Eurozine, Aspen Review and salon.eu.sk. From 2013 to 2023 she was  editor-at-large for Slovakia for Asymptotethe international online literary journal. She currently administers the group Slovak Literature in English Translation, co-curates the website SlovakLiterature.Com and curates the Slovak List for Seagull Books. In 2019 she was awarded the Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav prize for translating and promoting Slovak literature in the English-speaking world, and in 2023 she received Slovakia’s Minister of Culture’s award for her long-term work in translating and promoting Slovak literature. She lives in London.

PETER SHERWOOD studied Hungarian and linguistics in the University of London before being appointed, in 1972, to a lectureship in Hungarian at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (now part of University College London). He taught there until 2007. From 2008 until his retirement in 2014 he was László Birinyi, Sr., Distinguished Professor of Hungarian Language and Culture in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Peter Sherwood received the Pro Cultura Hungarica prize of the Hungarian Republic for contributions to Anglo-Hungarian relations in 2001, the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Hungarian Republic in 2007, the János Lotz medal of the International Association for Hungarian Studies in 2011, the László Országh prize of the Hungarian Society for the Study of English in 2016, and the Árpád Tóth Prize for Translation in 2020. He has reviewed regularly for The Times Literary Supplement (London) as well as the e-journal Hungarian Cultural Studies (Pittsburgh) and other scholarly journals. In addition to book-length publications, he has translated from a wide range of genres, including shorter prose which has appeared online in Asymptote, Words Without Borders, The Missing Slate and BODYLiterature. He lives in London.