Richard McKane is a poet and the translator of Selected Poems of Anna Akhmatova and, with Elizabeth McKane, of Mandelstam’s The Moscow Notebooks and The Voronezh Notebooks. Anvil has published The Pillar of Fire, his selection from the poetry of Nikolay Gumilyov. He has jointly translated with Ruth Christie extensive selections from two Turkish poets, Poems of Oktay Rifat and Beyond the Walls by Nâzim Hikmet. For many years he worked as a human rights interpreter.