Miriam McIlfatrick-Ksenofontov is a lecturer and freelance literary translator from Northern Ireland who has lived in Estonia since 1991. Her scholarly interests include comparative poetry, cognitive poetics, the oral poetic tradition and the poetics of translation. She translates Estonian poetry primarily for performance at festivals and collaborates with musicians, poets and artists. Her translations also regularly appear in journals and anthologies; recent publications include Six Estonian Poets (with others, Arc, 2015), Kätlin Kaldmaa’s One is None (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014), Contemporary Estonian Poetry, A Baltic Anthology: Book Three (with others, University of New Orleans Press, 2013), New European Poets (with others, Graywolf Press, 2008) and Black Ceiling – animated poetry (with others, Eesti Joonisfilm, 2007). Her translation of Doris Kareva’s Days of Grace: Selected Poems is published by Bloodaxe in 2018. Together with Doris Kareva she co-edited the bilingual Estonian-English anthology Windship with Oars of Light (Huma, 2001) and Rogha Dánta – seven Irish women poets in Estonian (verb, 2005). In 2015 she was guest-editor and co-translator of ‘Writing From the Edge: Estonian Literature’, an Estonian special issue of Words without Borders. Her own poetry has appeared in Estonian translation by Doris Kareva and she was awarded 2015 annual prize for poetry by the Estonian literary journal Looming.
