David McDuff (born 1945, Sale, Cheshire, England) is a Scottish translator, editor and literary critic.
McDuff attended the University of Edinburgh, where he studied Russian and German, gaining a PhD in 1971.[1] He married mathematician Dusa McDuff, but they separated around 1975.[2] After living for some time in the Soviet Union, Denmark, Iceland, and the United States, he eventually returned to 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.
Among literary awards, he has received the 1994 TLS/George Bernard Shaw Translation Prize for his translation of Gösta Ågren's poems, A Valley In The Midst of Violence, published by Bloodaxe, and the 2006 Stora Pris of the Finland-Swedish Writers' Association (Finlands svenska författareförening), Helsinki.
From 2007 to 2010, David McDuff worked as an editor and translator with Prague Watchdog, the Prague-based NGO 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.[3]
In November 2019 McDuff's new translation of Karin Boye's dystopian novel Kallocain was published by Penguin Classics.
McDuff was honoured with the Swedish Academy's Interpretation Prize (Tolkningspris) 2021.
McDuff’s translation of Anteckningar by Tua Forsström (I walked on into the forest, Bloodaxe, 2021) was The Poetry Book Society's Translation Choice for Winter 2021.