Michael Scammell

Professor

Michael Scammell received a B.A. from Nottingham, U.K., in 1958 and a Ph.D. from Columbia in 1985. His authorized biography of Arthur Koestler: Cosmic Reporter, the Life and Times of Arthur Koestler, will be published by Random House in the fall of 2007. He is the author of Solzhenitsyn, A Biography and editor of The Solzhenitsyn Files, Unofficial Art from the Soviet Union, and Russia's Other Writers. He has translated numerous books from Russian, including Nabokov's The Defense and The Gift, Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky, Childhood, Boyhood and Youth by Tolstoy, and memoirs by Soviet dissidents Anatoly Marchenko and Vladimir Bukovsky. He has also translated short stories and poetry from Serbo-Croatian and Slovenian, including Nothing Is Lost, the selected poems of Edvard Kocbek, published by the Princeton University Press in spring 2004. He is the founder and first editor of the London-based Human Rights journal, Index on Censorship. He has taught at Cornell University and Hunter College (CUNY) and was chair of the department of Russian literature, Cornell University. He has received Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Humanities, Wilson Center, Columbia University, Rockefeller Foundation, Arts Council of Great Britain, Ford Foundation, and Leverhulme Trust fellowships, and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the English PEN Nonfiction Prize for best biography of 1984 for Solzhenitsyn, A Biography. He is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, and The New Republic. He is a Vice President of International PEN and past president of PEN American Center, and recently co-founded the Center for Literary Translation at Columbia.