 wald Osers was born in Prague in May 1917 in a secular Jewish family. He studied chemistry in Prague and in London where he stayed after the Munich
Agreement, working with the BBC until his retirement in 1977. Osers started translating poetry as soon as in 1937, mostly into his mother tongue
German. In the UK he continued with the translation work, since 1942 exclusively into his "host" language English. He translated dozens of non-fiction
books from German, novels by Jiří Mucha, Arnošt Lustig, Ivan Klíma, Thomas Bernhard etc. but gradually became well-known for his
poetry translations, first of all of Czech poets, such as Jaroslav Seifert, Vítězslav Nezval, Miroslav Holub, Jan Skácel but also of
German poets (Rose Ausländer, Reiner Kunze, Hanns Cibulka and others), Bulgarian (Lubomir Levchev, Geo Milev and others) and Macedonian (Mateja
Matevski), as well as poetry of the Silesian poet Ondra Lysohorsky. In the late 1980s Osers focused also on two major Slovak poets: Miroslav Válek
(The Ground beneath our Feet, 1969) and Milan Rúfus (And That's the Truth, 2006 - together with Viera and James Sutherland-Smith). In the 1990s he
published poems by Štefan Strážay, Milan Richter, Margita Dobrovičová and others in British and US literary magazines and in
the Slovak Literary Review in Bratislava. Recently Osers translated the famous autobiographical novel by Alfréd Wetzler, one of the Slovak Jewish
escapees from Auschwitz, What Dante Didn't See (under the title Escape from Hell) and two theatre plays on Kafka written by Milan Richter.
Ewald Osers published three volumes of his own poetry and a book of memoirs (The Snows of Yesteryears) which was translated also into Czech. He served
as chairman of two British institutions (theTranslators Association and the Translators' Guild) in the 1970s and 1980s and he was vice-president of the
FIT (International Federation of Translators) for two terms. For his translations of around 150 books and promotion of national literatures in the
English speaking world he received more than 25 prizes and honours, e. g. the Schlegel-Tieck Prize 1971, the European Poetry Translation Prize 1987,
the Order of Cyril and Methodius, Bulgaria, 1987, the Austrian Translation Prize 1989, the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal
Republic of Germany 1991, the Macedonian Literature Award 1994, the Medal of Merit of the Czech Republic 1997, both Aurora Borealis Prizes (for fiction
translation and for non-fiction translation) 2002, and the Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav Prize, Slovakia, 2007.
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