Arch Tait learned Russian at Latymer Upper School, London; Trinity Hall, Cambridge; and Moscow State University. He has a PhD in Russian literature from Cambridge and began translating in earnest in 1986 after a meeting with Valentina Jacques, then editor of the magazine Soviet Literature. Since 1993 he has been the UK editor of the Glas New Russian Writing translation series. To date he has translated twenty-seven books, thirty-five short stories, and thirty articles by many of the leading Russian writers of today. His translation of Anna Politkovskaya’s Putin’s Russia won the inaugural English PEN Literature in Translation Prize in 2010.