Rosamund Bartlett was born in London. She holds a doctorate from Oxford, and spent fifteen years pursuing an academic career, latterly as Reader in Russian at the University of Durham, before becoming a full-time writer, translator and lecturer. She continues to maintain an active scholarly profile, and has held fellowships at St. Antony's College, Oxford, and the European University Institute in Florence. In 2015 she was awarded the Mary Zirin prize by the Association for Women in Slavic Studies. She is currently an Honorary Research Fellow of the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford. In 2024 she became a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Brasenose College, Oxford.

Her books include Wagner and Russia, Shostakovich in Context, Chekhov: Scenes from a Life, and Tolstoy: A Russian Life, which was longlisted for the 2011 Samuel Johnson Prize.  As a translator, she has published two anthologies of Chekhov’s short stories,  and is the editor and co-translator of Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters.  She is the co-editor of Chekhov's Earliest Stories.  Her  translation of Anna Karenina for Oxford World’s Classics was published in 2014.  She has produced an annotated translation of the libretto to the Futurist opera Victory over the Sun, and translated the librettos of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and Weinberg’s The Idiot for the Salzburg Festival.

She has written on Russian and East European art for Apollo  and The Burlington Magazine and lectured at institutions all over the world, from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, where she lives, to the Art Gallery of NSW in Sydney.  She is frequently asked to write programme notes for concerts, operas and plays,  including for Covent Garden, Glyndebourne, the Salzburg Festival and Aldeburgh Festivals, and the Almeida Theatre, and has worked as a consultant. She contributes regularly to programmes on BBC Radio such as Opera on 3 , In Our Time and Proms broadcasts. After leading a campaign to restore Chekhov’s house in Yalta, she became a Trustee of the Anton Chekhov Foundation, a UK charity set up to preserve and honour the writer’s literary and humanitarian legacy.

BBC Radio 4, In Our Time, Chekhov
Guardian Paperback Q&A on writing Tolstoy’s biography
Five Books interview on Russian short stories


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