12 Facts About Michael Scammell

Michael Scammell was born on 1935 and is an English author, biographer and translator of Slavic literature.

Michael Scammell's first translation was a novel, Cities and Years, by the Soviet author, Konstantin Fedin.

In 1971, Michael Scammell became the first director of the nonprofit Writers and Scholars International in London, and started the quarterly magazine, Index on Censorship, devoted to documenting censorship worldwide and promoting freedom of expression.

Michael Scammell was commissioned to write the authorized biography of Arthur Koestler, which after fifteen years of research and writing was published in the United States in 2009 as Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth Century Skeptic, and in the UK in 2010 as Koestler: The Indispensable Intellectual.

Michael Scammell reported a new English translation to appear in 2019, with a different introduction and appendices.

In 1985, Michael Scammell returned to the United States to settle there permanently.

Michael Scammell retired from Columbia at the end of 2011.

Michael Scammell is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a vice president of International PEN.

Michael Scammell has received fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Program, the Arts Council of Great Britain, the Ford Foundation, the Leverhulme Trust, the Jerusalem Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Historical Research Foundation.

Michael Scammell is married to Rosemary Nossiff, a professor of Political Science at Marymount Manhattan College and previously a professor at Rutgers University.

Michael Scammell was previously married to Erika Roettges, with whom he has four children, Catherine, Stephen, Lesley and Ingrid.

Michael Scammell has written for the Times Literary Supplement, The Observer, and The Guardian in the UK and has contributed articles and criticism to the New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, Harper's, The New Republic, AGNI, and several other journals in the US.