Eric Dickens was born in Yorkshire, UK, in 1953, and attended grammar school near Birmingham. He studied Swedish and literature at the University of East Anglia (UEA) during the early 1970s. Since then he has taught English in Finland, Sweden, and the Netherlands. He published his first book-length translation, from Swedish, in 1985: Jan Mårtenson’s Drottningholm, The Palace by the Lakeside. Over the 1990s and 2000s Eric has translated several books of fiction by Jaan Kross, Friedebert Tuglas, Mati Unt, and Toomas Vint from the Estonian for British and American publishers. More recently he has translated the short novel Melancholy 2 by the Norwegian author Jon Fosse. Eric has lived in Finland, Poland, the Netherlands, and Estonia, each for a year or more, and now lives in Sweden. He speaks Swedish and Dutch fluently, and has a reading knowledge of French, German, Polish, and the larger Scandinavian languages. “The White Room” is Eric’s first published translation from Finnish, done in cooperation with the author.