Education
He attended the University of Edinburgh, where he studied Russian and German.
He attended the University of Edinburgh, where he studied Russian and German.
After living for some time in the Soviet Union, Denmark, Iceland, and the United States, he eventually settled in the United Kingdom, where he worked for several years as a co-editor and reviewer on the literary magazine Stand. He then moved to London, where he began his career as a literary translator. McDuff"s translations include both foreign poetry and prose, including poems by Joseph Brodsky and Tomas Venclova, and novels including Fyodor Dostoyevsky"s Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and The Idiot (all three in Penguin Classics).
His Complete Poems of Edith Södergran (1984, 1992) and Complete Poems of Karin Boye (1994) were published by Bloodaxe Books.
McDuff’s translation of the Finnish-language author Tuomas Kyrö’s 2011 novel The Beggar and the Hare was published in 2014. From 2007 to 2010, David McDuff worked as an editor and translator with Prague Watchdog, the Prague-based non-governmental organization which monitored and discussed human rights abuses in Chechnya and the North Caucasus.
McDuff was honoured with the Finnish State Award for Foreign Translators in 2013.