Patrick Miles writes plays, poems, short stories and essays and is one of the U.K.'s foremost theatre-translators. His first plays and translations were staged by his own theatre company 1974-77, since when he has worked for the Royal National Theatre, Cambridge Theatre Company, the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and many others. His association with Russia and the work of Anton Chekhov goes back over fifty years. He has taught Russian translation and literature at Cambridge University, run his own translation agency for twelve years, and now works mainly on his own writing and commissioned literary translations.