Ingrid Lansford grew up in Denmark and Germany. She immigrated to the United States at age eighteen and received a Ph.D. in English from the University of Texas at Austin. After teaching English at the college level, she ran a freelance translation business for over ten years. She has published literary translations in the German-English bilingual magazine Dimension2 and won the American-Scandinavian Foundation's Leif and Inger Sjöberg Translation Prize in 2004.