Tom Priestly was born in Uganda in 1937, grew up in England, and has lived in Canada since 1966. He studied at Cambridge (MA, 1965) and at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, where he received his PhD in 1972. He is Professor Emeritus of Russian and Slavic Linguistics at the University of Alberta. His special research interest is Slovenian sociolinguistics; since 1978 he has been based in the village of Sele in Carinthia, Austria. He has published over 90 research articles. Since 1989 he has been translating Slovenian literature, especially the poetry of France Balantič, Maja Haderlap, Kajetan Kovič, Cvetka Lipuš and (together with Henry R. Cooper) France Prešeren.