Dr. Uilleam Blacker

Biography

Uilleam Blacker is a scholar and translator specializing in Ukrainian and East-Central European literature and culture. In addition to academic publications, he has written for The Atlantic, The Guardian, and The Times Literary Supplement, and has commented on Ukrainian culture, history, and politics for BBC, The Guardian, The Telegraph, Al Jazeera, and ITV. He has translated works by Ukrainian authors published in The Guardian, The White Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, and Words Without Borders, and regularly reviews literature and translation in the press. In 2023, he served as a judge for the International Booker Prize, and in 2022, he was a Paul Celan Translation Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. Joining UCL SSEES as a lecturer in 2014, he has held postdoctoral positions at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and previously studied at UCL SSEES, Jagiellonian University in Kraków, and the University of Glasgow. He has held research fellowships from the British Academy, the Leverhulme Foundation, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. He speaks fluent Ukrainian, Polish, and Russian.

Research Interests

Experience