Andrew Oakland was born in Nottingham in the Midlands of England in 1966. He is a graduate in German from the Universities of Southampton and Nottingham. From 1994 he taught for ten years at Masaryk University in the Czech city of Brno, where he still lives. He has been a freelance translator from the Czech and the German since 2005. Novels in his translation include Michal Ajvaz's The Golden Age and Empty Streets (both published by Dalkey Archive Press; the former was a Fiction Finalist at the 2011 Best Translated Book Awards), Radka Denemarkov�'s Money from Hitler (Women's Press, Toronto), Martin Fahrner's The Invincible Seven (P�lava Publishing, Brno), and a new rendering of Mikes, Josef Lada's classic Czech work for children (published as Nico by Albatros, Prague).