Michael Scammell

Literary and political biographer, translator. Has written two prizewinning biographies: Solzhenitsyn, a Biography (1984) and Koestler, the Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic (2009); has translated The Gift and The Defense by Vladimir Nabokov, Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Childhood, Boyhood and Youth by Lev Tolstoy, among other works; and is the editor of The Solzhenitsyn Files, Unofficial Art from the Soviet Union and Russia's Other Writers. In 1972 he founded and edited the anti-censorship journal, Index on Censorship; from 1976-1986 he was Chair of the Writers in Prison Committee of International PEN; he is an honorary Vice President of International PEN and a past president of American PEN. He is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and is working on a memoir.