Copyright photo Dmitri Kotjuh, 2022, Käsmu/Estonian Literature Centre
We were very sad to hear recently of the death of our friend and colleague Chris Moseley. Chris has been associated with the press since the early days of its activities, and has worked with us on several projects. In 1994 we published From Baltic Shores, an anthology of texts from Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Sweden. The credits say ‘selected and edited by Christopher Moseley’, but he actually translated most of the texts too, from at least five of the six languages. He later revised the translation of the Estonian Anton Tammsaare’s novel The Misadventures of the New Satan (2009).
More recently Chris has translated several novels for Norvik Press. In 2018 came his translation of Ilmar Taska’s Pobeda 1946 from Estonian, in 2020 that of Inga Ābele’s The Year the River Froze Twice from Latvian, and in 2026 that of Rein Raud’s The Sun Script, again from Estonian. In each case he worked together with the authors, who were most appreciative of his commitment and his skill in rendering their texts in English.
Chris was a gifted linguist with a wide range of abilities and a particular interest in minority and endangered languages; he wrote his PhD on Livonian, a dying language of Latvia. Originally from Australia, he came to the University of East Anglia in 1974 to study Scandinavian languages. From Swedish his interest moved to Finnish and then to the Baltic languages, and after graduating he specialized in Baltic affairs at the BBC World Service. More recently he has taught Estonian and Latvian at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UCL.
As well as being a talented translator, Chris was a genial and enthusiastic colleague. He will be sadly missed.
