JOHN FARNDON

John Farndon is a writer, poet, playwright, and songwriter living in London, and a translator of literature from Eurasia, including plays for the Worldwide Ukrainian Play Readings (2022). He has written over a thousand books on science, nature, and other topics, translated into most languages and shortlisted five times for the Young People’s Science Book Prize. His translations of the poetry of Lidia Grigorieva were nominated for five major awards, including the Griffin. He was joint winner of the 2019 EBRD Literature Prize for translating the poetry in Uzbek writer Hamid Ismailov’s The Devil’s Dance, and a finalist for the 2020 US PEN translation award for his translation of Kazakh writer Rollan Seysenbaev’s The Dead Wander in the Desert. His translations of the lyrics of Vladimir Vysotsky were published as Vladimir Vysotsky, Selected Works by Glagoslav Publications in 2022. He ran the Arc venue at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and the Cauldron series of poetry and music events. He was chair of the Eurasian Creative Guild 2019–2021.