Andrew Rickard

I studied French and German at McGill University in Montreal; I graduated with first-class joint honours and won the Swiss Ambassador’s Prize for German. Thanks to a scholarship from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), I also spent a semester studying Weimar literature and contemporary philosophy at the Universität Regensburg.

After university I wound up in the insurance and investment business. The first few years were… unpleasant. I earned the Certified Financial Planner (CFP) designation, for whatever that’s worth, but lacked the temperament for a career in sales. Eventually I escaped to financial journalism and book publishing, and was happy to drop the CFP. Goodbye to all that.

I worked as an editor and hack writer for more than fifteen years (roughly the same amount of time one would spend in prison for second-degree murder, served without the satisfaction of having killed someone) before I grew tired of it, and decided to return to my first and truest loves: languages and literature. I now spend my free time ferrying dead authors into English and back into print. It was a long road home.


Was man in der Jugend wünscht, hat man im Alter die Fülle.
— Goethe