Julia Sherwood (1954) is an award-winning translator and literary organiser. She was born and grew up in Bratislava, and after studying English and Slavonic languages and literature in Cologne, London and Munich she settled in the UK. She lives in London with her husband, Peter Sherwood, a linguist and translator. For over 20 years she worked for Amnesty International and while living in the US from 2008 to 2014 she started translating fiction and non-fiction from and into Slovak, and from Czech, Polish and Russian into English. Jointly with Peter Sherwood she has translated works by Daniela Kapitáňová, Jana Juráňová, Peter Krištúfek, Balla, Uršuľa Kovalyk, Pavel Vilikovský, Michal Hvorecký and Ivana Dobrakovová. She serves as editor-at-large for Slovakia for Asymptote, the online journal for literary translation. In 2019 she organised a UK-wide festival of Slovak literature and culture, “Raising the Velvet Curtain”. She administers the group Slovak Literature in English Translation on Facebook and co-curates the website SlovakLiterature.com with Magdalena Mullek, with whom she edited Into the Spotlight, an anthology of contemporary Slovak fiction. In 2019 she was awarded the Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav prize for translating and promoting Slovak literature.
