Josephine Balmer was born in Hampshire in 1959. She studied Classics and Ancient History at University College, London, and has worked as a continuing education lecturer in Classics and Comparative Literature. She is a freelance writer and translator. She has published four books with Bloodaxe: her translation Sappho: Poems and Fragments (1992) and the companion anthology, Classical Women Poets (1996), and her new translation Catullus: Poems of Love and Hate, published in 2004 with Chasing Catullus: poems, translations & transgressions. Her latest collection, The Word for Sorrow, for which she was awarded a Wingate Foundation Scholarship, was published by Salt in 2009. She has written widely on poetry and translation for publications such as the Observer, The Independent on Sunday, The Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman, and is reviews editor of Modern Poetry in Translation. Chair of the Translators’ Association from 2002 to 2005, she is a present judge of The Times/Stephen Spender Prize for poetry in translation and has recently been awarded a PhD by Publication in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. She lives in Crowborough, East Sussex and in Cornwall.