Michelle Woods

I was born in London in the early seventies and grew up in Dublin and England. Half-Irish and half-Czech, I travelled numerous times to Czechoslovakia as a child and lived in Prague for four years, completing my PhD. I studied English and Russian at Trinity College, Dublin and wrote my PhD there on the translations of Milan Kundera’s Czech novels. I was a Fulbright scholar at Columbia University and then an IRCHSS Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at DCU. I have been an Assistant Professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz since 2008.

I have written three books on three Czech-born authors and the translations of their work: Translating Milan Kundera (Multilingual Matters, 2006); Censoring Translation: Censorship, Theatre and the Politics of Translation (Continuum, 2012) – on Havel; and Kafka Translated: How Translators Have Shaped Our Reading of Kafka (Bloomsbury, 2013).

I live in upstate New York with my husband, Michael, and Lenny the dog and Izzy the cat.