JOHN RIDLAND was born in 1933 in London, England, of Scottish ancestry. He calls himself an Anglo-Californian immigrant. He received a PhD in English Literature at Claremont Graduate School in 1964. Before finishing the degree, he began teaching at UC Santa Barbara, which remained his base for 43 years. Since retiring in 2004–2005 he has been writing and translating widely, publishing his own poems in Happy in an Ordinary Thing (2013) and various magazines including The Hudson Review, Poetry, Sewanee Review, River Styx, and Per Contra (online, Issue 31). In 1999 Corvina Press published his translation of Petőfi’s János Vitéz as John the Valiant, with thirty illustrations by Peter Meller, for which he received the Gold Medal of the Arpad Academy in Cleveland, Ohio, and the Bálint Balassi Sword Award. With Peter Czipott he has translated a volume of poems by Sándor Márai, The Withered World (Alma Classics, London, 2013) and another by Miklós Radnóti, All That Still Matters at All (New American Press, 2014).