CV

November 2022
Residency in Skopje, North Macedonia

October/November 2021 
Travel grant from i-Portunus for a trip to Belgrade

October 2020
Residency in Zagreb, Croatia

October 2018
Residency in Cetinje, Montenegro

May 2017
Residency in Pazin, Croatia

2016
Longlisted for the International DUBLIN Literary Award with Andrej Nikolaidis’s Till Kingdom Come

October 2016
Official guest of the Belgrade International Book Fair

2015
Shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize and longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award with Aleksandar Gatalica’s The Great War

August 2015
Residency in Tršić, Serbia

2013
Travel grant from the German Translators’ Fund for a trip to Macedonia

2008/2009
Scholarship from the German Translators’ Fund for translating Luan Starova’s novel Ervehe: Kniga za edna majka from Macedonian into German

2001
Accreditation as a translator from Croatian, Macedonian and Russian into English with NAATI (the National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters, Australia)

1998 and 2001
Grants from the Institute for Anarchist Studies (USA) for translating various Russian and Bulgarian texts

1997
One-month bursary at the British Centre for Literary Translation, Norwich, translating a Yugoslav children’s book (Kumewawa Son of the Amazon by Tibor Sekelj)

1995
Successful completion of the German State Translator’s Examination for English; soon afterwards I became a “sworn translator” for English

since 1991
freelance translator in Berlin

1990 – 91
English tutor at the Technical University of Magdeburg, (East) Germany

1990
Birth of my son

1989 – 90
Postgraduate year in Russian philology at the Pushkin Institute in Moscow

1988 – 89
Postgraduate year in South-Slavic Studies at the University of Zagreb

1987 – 88
Assistant English teacher at two high schools in Passau, West Germany

1983 – 86
BA in German, Russian and Serbo-Croat at the Australian National University, Canberra

1977 – 82
Secondary school in Canberra (including 5-month stay as exchange student in West Germany)

1969 – 76
Primary school in Glasgow, Scotland, and Canberra

1965
born in Newcastle, Australia 

Memberships

The German literary translators’ organisation Verband deutschsprachiger Übersetzer (VdÜ)
www.literaturuebersetzer.de

The Translators Association (UK)
www.societyofauthors.org/translators-association

Zagreb 2018 (C) Marko Todorov – Cropix
Zagreb 2018 (C) Marko Todorov – Cropix
2021 (C) private
2021 (C) private
2020 (C) private
2020 (C) private

What others say about me

It’s a tribute to the agility and perseverance of translator Will Firth that Krleža’s incendiary prose strikes home with such fluent power.

Jonathan Bousfield reviewing Miroslav Krleža’s Journey to Russia on Stray Satellite, 2018

A special place must also be accorded to Will Firth, who has translated the Bosnian original into an English laden with unique atmosphere, at once exotically local yet recognizably universal throughout.

Andrew Singer reviewing Faruk Šehić’s Quiet Flows the Una in World Literature Today, 2016

Our Man in Iraq may well prove to be one of those rare cases where something is actually gained in translation.

Emily Donaldson reviewing Robert Perišić’s novel in The Star, 2013