Elaine Feinstein was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge. She has worked as a university lecturer, a subeditor, and a freelance journalist. Since 1980, when she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she has lived as a full-time writer. In 1990, she received a Cholmondeley Award for Poetry, and was given an Honorary D.Litt from the University of Leicester. Her versions of the poems of Marina Tsvetaeva – for which she received three translation awards from the Arts Council – were first published in 1971. She has written fourteen novels, many radio plays, television dramas, and five biographies. Her poems have been widely anthologised. Her Collected Poems and Translations (Carcanet, 2002) was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. She has served as a judge for the Gregory Awards, the Independent Foreign Fiction Award, the Costa Poetry Prize and the Rossica Award for Literature translated from Russian, and in 1995 was chairman of the judges for the T.S. Eliot Prize.