Nora Gal (1912–1991)

Nora Gal was born Eleonora Yakovlevna Galperina in Odessa, the daughter of a physician. She moved to Moscow with her family as a child. She graduated from the Lenin Pedagogical Institute and completed postgraduate studies with a thesis on Arthur Rimbaud. She published articles on classical and contemporary foreign literature by authors such as Lord Byron, Guy de Maupassant, and Alfred de Musset. She married literary critic Boris Kuzmin and later became editor of his selected works. She started her career as a translator during World War II, and after the war devoted herself to translating authors such as Jules Renard, Alexandre Dumas père and H.G. Wells.

In the 1950s, she translated The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, and novels by J.D. Salinger into Russian. In the last period of her active life, she tackled such masterpieces as The Stranger by Albert Camus and Death of a Hero by Richard Aldington, along with books by Thomas Wolfe and Katherine Anne Porter, and a number of science fiction works by Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, Roger Zelazny, Ursula K. Le Guin, and others.

In 1972, she published Words Living and Words Dead, a manual on writing and translating. The Nora Gal Prize for the best translation of short story from English into Russian is awarded annually.