Bio
Ronald Meyer is the translator of Anna Akhmatova's My Half-Century: Selected Prose (Ardis, Northwestern UP, Overlook, 1992-2013), for which he was awarded a grant from the Wheatland Foundation. His translation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's "White Nights" (Penguin Little Black Classics, 2016) became a social media sensation, which The Guardian dubbed "Fyodor Fever" (December 17, 2024), catapulting the book to the ranks of the "fourth most sold work of literature in translation in the UK." Meyer's translation had first appeared six years earlier in his edition of The Gambler and Other Stories.
Ronald began my career as translator and editor of translations from Russian at Ardis Publishers, where he held the position of senior editor throughout the 1980s. At the time, Ardis was the largest publisher of Russian literature in translation and in the original outside of the USSR. Ronald is currently working on a book manuscript about Ardis. A glimpse at Meyer's work at Ardis can be seen in the short essay "Cold War Dress Code Remembering Inna Lisnyanskaya," commissioned by PEN America for Banned Books Week (October 2015).
Chekhov represents another major figure in Ronald's work as translator and scholar. He ranslated three stories for the Norton Critical Edition of Chekhov's Selected Stories (2014), one of which, "The Death of a Government Clerk," was broadcast on Symphony Space's "Selected Shorts" (January 2018). He was commissioned by the Atlantic Theatre Company (New York) to translate Chekhov's "Cherry Orchard," which was adapted for the stage by playwright Tom Donaghy (2005). His translation of Chekhov's "Kashtanka," commissioned by the great Drenka Willen, was adapted for a children's edition with illustrations by Gennady Spirin (Harcourt Brace, 1995). He has authored two scholarly articles on Chekhov in English translation.
Ronald was Director of the MA Program in Russian Literary Translation at Columbia University for over 20 years. He is a member of PEN America's Translation Committee, and served on the jury for the 2016 PEN Translation Prize. He was awarded a fellowship from the Likhachev Foundation (St. Petersburg) in 2011. He holds a Ph.D. in Russian Literature, with a minor in Polish literature, from Indiana University.
For the past several years Ronald have been working more in Polish literature. He is the editor of Anna Frajlich's The Ghost of Shakespeare: Collected Essays (2020) and guest editor of a special issue of The Polish Review, dedicated to Frajlich's work (March 2022). He is currently translating Frajlich's The Laboratory, her collection of short prose. He is a member of the advisory board of the Polish literary journal Tematy i Konteksty (University of Rzeszów) and Polish Biographical Studies (University of Szczecin).