Francis R. Jones was born in Yorkshire in 1955. He studied languages, literature and linguistics at the universities of Cambridge, Sarajevo, Reading and Newcastle. He is Emeritus Professor of Translation Studies at Newcastle University, and lives in Northumberland. Jones translates poetry, mainly from Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian and Dutch into English. He has also worked from Russian, Hungarian and Caribbean languages, and into Yorkshire and Geordie dialect.
Jones has published 15 solo-translated collections. These include six volumes by Serbian/Yugoslav poet Ivan V. Lalić, and one by Dutch poet Esther Jansma, What It Is: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe, Books, 2008). One book, Jones’s English version of Bosnian poet Mak Dizdar’s Stone Sleeper (Anvil Press Poetry, 2009), has been translated onward into six other languages. His translations have also appeared in chapbooks and jointly-translated volumes, in journals and anthologies. His new edition of Ivan V. Lalić's poetry, The Taste of Lightning: Selected Poems, is published by Bloodaxe in 2025, to be followed by About Time: Selected Poems by Gerrit Kouwenaar in 2026.
Jones’s translations have won no fewer than 15 prizes. These include the prestigious European Poetry Translation Prize twice, for his versions of Ivan V. Lalić. And his translation oeuvre from Dutch gained him the 2005 inaugural James Brockway Prize for the Translation of Dutch Poetry.
