Kitty Mrosovsky

Kitty Mrosovsky (1946–1995) was born in England though spent the formative years of her childhood in Tunisia and Rome, where her Russian-Italian father—a close friend of Vladimir Nabokov’s from their student days together at Cambridge—was working as a geophysicist. After taking a first class honours degree and a BPhil in comparative literature from Somerville College, Oxford, Mrosovsky worked as a book reviewer, an Open University tutor, and a theater critic. She was also a talented pianist. Her highly acclaimed translation of Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1980) was later reissued as a Penguin Classic, and her first novel Hydra (1985) received similarly enthusiastic applause. She was only 48 years old when she died.