translators

Ali Sobati is an Iranian poet, critic, essayist, journalist, and translator. For over two decades he has been one of the leading academic literary voices of his generation. Ali is currently based outside Iran.

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Daoud Sarhandi-Williams is an award-winning, multidisciplinary filmmaker and writer of Anglo-Indian and Pakistani heritage. Previous titles include Bosnian War Posters and Ukraine at War: Street Art, Posters + Poetry.

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Ella Dingley was born in Minsk in 1962. She studied Belarusian and Russian languages and literatures in the Belarusian State University in Minsk, and graduated in 1984. She then worked as a teacher of Russian in a Minsk secondary school, and later taught Russian as a foreign language. Later in 1990, when working as a journalist for the foreign service of Radio Minsk, she attended celebrations to mark the 500 year anniversary of the birth of the Belarusian first printer Francis Skaryna in the city of Polacak. It was here that she met Jim, and both of their lives changed radically. Following her arrival in the UK, Ella worked as a stringer for the Russian section of the BBC World Service and the Belarusian Service of Radio Liberty. She has taught Russian with the School of Slavonic and East European Studies and more recently has been teaching English as a foreign language.

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Brought up in post-industrial Lanarkshire, Petra Reid did Law at Edinburgh University and worked as a solicitor in general practice, and more recently as a welfare rights adviser. She studied Fine Art while raising a family and developed her interest in poetry through Dada. She does site specific performances at one-off events. She has wandered the east coast of Scotland with a west coast accent for forty years. This is her only qualification for feeding other authors’ works through the mincer of Scots, or at least her version of what may, after all, be a dialect without army or navy.  

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Jim Dingley was born in Leeds in 1942. He studied Russian at the University of Cambridge in the early 1960s. He worked as a Research Assistant at the British Library (then part of the British Museum). He was later appointed Lecturer in Russian at the University of Reading. In 1984 he moved to the School of Slavonic and East
European Studies (now part of University College London); he was made Senior Lecturer in Ukrainian Studies in the 1990s. He became Manager of the Language
Unit of the School in 1997, with responsibility for developing the use of computers in language learning. He retired in 2002. His close association with the Belarusian community in the UK began in 1966. In particular he became associated with the Francis Skaryna Belarusian Library and Museum in London, without doubt the largest collection of books in Belarusian and collection of books in several languages about Belarus outside Belarus itself. Since retirement he has translated several books of Belarusian history and literature into English, including two for the Scotland Street Press, A Large Czesław Miłosz with a dash of Elvis Presley by Tania Skarynkina, and Alindarka’s Children by Alhierd Bacharevič. Both of these books won the English Pen Award for Translation. Alindarka’s Children was longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness prize.

He is married to Ella, a native Belarusian speaker from Minsk.

Jim was awarded a Francis Skaryna Medal in 1991 and a Belarusian Democratic Republic 100th Jubilee Medal in 2019 for his significant contribution to Belarusian studies.

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