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. 

Her books include Wagner and Russia, Chekhov: Scenes from a Life, and Tolstoy: A Russian Life, which was longlisted for the 2011 Samuel Johnson Prize.  She has also received recognition as a translator, having edited the first unexpurgated collection of Chekhov’s letters for Penguin Classics, and produced the first new translation of Anna Karenina for Oxford World’s Classics in 96 years. Her Chekhov anthology About Love and Other Stories was shortlisted for the Weidenfeld Translation Prize.  As well as her annotated translation of the libretto to the Futurist opera Victory over the Sun, she has translated the librettos of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and Weinberg’s The Idiot for the Salzburg Festival.

She has published articles and reviews in publications such as Financial Times, The Guardian and Apollo, and been commissioned to write programme notes by institutions such as the Royal Opera House,  Glyndebourne, the Salzburg Festival and the Royal Shakespeare Company.  Lecturing work has taken her to venues such as the National Theatre, the National Gallery, the Royal Festival Hall and the British Library, and since 2012 has delivered regular lecture series at the Art Gallery of NSW in Sydney, most recently on Kandinsky, and on the women artists of European modernism.  She has worked as a consultant to London orchestras and contributed to programmes on BBC Radio such as Opera on 3 and In Our Time. 

She has travelled extensively throughout Russia and the countries of the former Soviet Union.  In 2007 she began a campaign to restore Chekhov’s house in Yalta, and remains a Trustee of the Anton Chekhov Foundation, a UK charity set up to preserve and honour the writer’s literary and humanitarian legacy.  She lives in Oxford