Julia Sherwood was born and grew up in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia. After studying in Germany she settled in the UK, working for Amnesty International and Save the Children. Since 2008 she has worked as a freelance translator of fiction and nonfiction from Slovak, Czech, Polish, and Russian. Her translations into English (jointly with Peter Sherwood) include book-length works by Balla, Ivana Dobrakovová, Jana Juráňová, Daniela Kapitáňová, Hubert Klimko-Dobrzaniecki, Uršuľa Kovalyk, Peter Krištúfek, Petra Procházková and Pavel Vilikovský; and into Slovak, books by Tony Judt and Hamid Ismailov. She has co-edited the anthology Into the Spotlight. New Writing from Slovakia with Magdalena Mullek, with whom she also runs the website SlovakLiterature.com. She is based in London and serves as the editor-at-large for Slovakia for Asymptote.