Julia Sherwoord was born and grew up in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia (now the Slovak Republic). After studying English and Slavonic languages and literature in Cologne, London and Munich she settled in the UK. She spent more than 20 years working in the NGO sector, travelling widely in Central and Eastern Europe and the former USSR. From 2008 to 2014 she lived in North Carolina, and since 2008 has been working as a freelance translator from Slovak, Czech, Polish, Russian and German into English (with Peter Sherwood), as well as into Slovak. She is editor-at-large for Slovakia for Asymptote (covering also the Czech Republic and Poland), the international online literary journal. Her Czech translations include excerpts from Radka Denemarková’s novels Kobold, A Contribution to the History of Joy and Hours of Lead, as well as Petra Procházková’s Freshta and Alena Mornštajnová’s Hana. She has also translated the graphic novels The Sisters Dietl by Vojtěch Mašek and Savages by Lucie Lomová.