Vera Rich

Who was Vera Rich?

Vera Rich was a British poet, journalist, historian, and translator from Belarusian and Ukrainian.

Born in London, she studied at St Hilda's College of University of Oxford and Bedford College, London. In 1959, her poetry attracted the attention of the editors of John O'London's Weekly and the following year her first collection of verse, Outlines, was privately produced and received favourable reviews, selling out within six months.

Her translations of the works of Taras Shevchenko, commissioned for the century of his death received excellent reviews, both in the West and in the Soviet Ukraine. For this work, Vera Rich was awarded an Honorary Diploma in Shevchenko Studies by the Ukrainian Free Academy of Sciences.

Later, influenced by Fr. Ceslaus Sipovich, she started also translating Belarusian poetry. Her first translation from Belarusian was the poem Na čužynie by Janka Kupala. Her Like Water, Like Fire published in 1971 became the world's first anthology of translations of Belarusian poetry into a western European language. Later she published The Images Swarm Free, a collection of translations of verses by prominent Belarusian authors, Aleś Harun, Maksim Bahdanovič, and Źmitrok Biadula.