Rosamund Bartlett

As an author, Rosamund Bartlett is best known for her biographies of Chekhov and Tolstoy, for which she drew on previously inaccessible materials, and her own extensive experience living and working in Russia. She is rare amongst biographers of foreign prose writers in having simultaneously translated their work, finding mutually beneficial insights in both activities, not least for her own literary practice. Her acclaimed editions of Chekhov’s About Love and Other Stories and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, for which she also contributed the introductions and notes, are published by Oxford World’s Classics. She also edited and co-translated a collection of Chekhov’s letters for Penguin Classics.

Rosamund’s other writing ranges across cultures and disciplines, and is fuelled by a desire to find connections between works of art, music and literature and see them in historical and political context. She began her professional life as a publishing secretary, then went on to write a doctoral thesis on Wagner’s influence in Russia which became her first book, published by Cambridge University Press. Over the fifteen years she worked as an academic she came to realise her true vocation was to communicate her subject to a wider audience. She is still active as a scholar, but is now a full-time writer, translator and public speaker. Her current book project focuses on the revolution in the arts which took place in the early 20th century in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Odesa and Kyiv, and its connection to European modernism. 

A keen amateur cellist, she lives in Oxford.