Professor Donald Rayfield is Emeritus Professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary University of London, where he has taught from 1967 to 2005. He is the author of monographs on Chekhov, Przhevalsky, Stalin and his Hangmen, and the history and literature of Georgia, some of which have been translated into Russian and other languages. He has written numerous articles on Russian, Georgian and comparative literature, has edited the diaries of A. S. Suvorin and the poetry of Tatiana Shchepkina-Kupernik and was chief editor of A Comprehensive Georgian-English Dictionary. His translations from Russian include Gogol's Dead Souls, stories by Garshin and poems by Mandelshtam. He runs the Garnett Press, an imprint that has published four Slovak and two Georgian novels in translation. He reviews regularly for TLS and the Literary Review. He is currently completing a Russian version of his Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia.
   
   

Dr. Oliver Ready is Research Fellow and Director of the Russkiy Mir Programme at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and Russia and East-Central Europe editor at the Times Literary Supplement. His translations of Vladimir Sharov's novel Before and During (Dedalus) and Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment (Penguin Classics) are due to be published in January and February, 2014.  Dr. Ready is general editor of the anthology, The Ties of Blood: Russian Literature from the 21st Century (Rossica, 2008). In 2005, he received the inaugural Rossica Prize for his translation The Prussian Bride, by Yuri Buida.

   
   

Dr. Jamie Rann is one of the editors of The Calvert Journal, an online guide to creative Russia. He has taught translation from Russian at UCL and Queen Mary University of London and is the translator of It's Time by Pavel Kostin, The Living by Anna Starobinets and various other shorter works. He is currently working on a collection of short stories by Anna Starobinets, to be published this autumn. He has a long and happy history with the Rossica Young Translators Award, having won it himself in 2009 and coordinated the prize in 2010 and 2011.