Richard McKane (1947-2016) read Russian at Oxford. The original edition of his Selected Poems of Anna Akhmatova appeared from Penguin/OUP in 1969. An expanded edition was later published by Bloodaxein 1989. He lived in Turkey for six years in the 1970s, working on an archaeological dig in Kandahar, Afghanistan for some of this time. In 1978 he was awarded the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University where he met his former wife Elizabeth, with whom he later he brought out editions of Osip Mandelstam's Moscow Notebooks (1991) and Voronezh Notebooks (1996) with Bloodaxe – these were later combined in The Moscow and Voronezh Notebooks (Bloodaxe Books, 2003). For over eighteen years, he worked as an interpreter from, and into, Turkish and Russian at the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture. As a translator, Richard McKane, working with Ruth Christie, brought out two selections of Oktay Rifat's work, Voices of Memory and Poems and, with Tâlat Halman, Beyond the Walls: Poems of Nâzým Hikmet; he also translated the work of Nikolai Gumilyov, Olga Sedakova and Aronzon. As a poet, he had two bilingual books published in Turkey, Turkey Poems and Coffee House Poems, and a selection, Amphora for Metaphors in New York.
