Richard McKane is a poet, translator and retired human rights interpreter. He studied Russian at Oxford and published his first translations of Anna Akhmatova (Penguin and Oxford University Press 1969) on graduation. For most of the '70s he lived in Turkey, getting to know the foremost writers. In 1978-79 he was on a Fellowship at Princeton University where he worked on translating Osip Mandelstam (Bloodaxe 1991, 1996) with his former wife. In the early '90s he teamed up with Ruth Christie and translated Oktay Rifat (Rockingham Press and Yapi Kredi Yayinlari 1993, and Anvil Press 2007) and Nazim Hikmet (Beyond the Walls: Poems with Talat Sait Halman 2002, Anvil Press). His own collections of poetry include Amphora for Metaphors (1993), published by Gnosis Press in New York; The Turkey Poems (1994) and Coffee House Poems (2003), two bilingual editions published by Yapi Kredi; and the forthcoming Out of the Cold Blue: A First Collection, to be published in October, 2008 by Hearing Eye, London, which also published his Poet for Poet in 1999.