Jo Shortt Butler took her degrees in Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic at Cambridge University - with an interlude studying modern Icelandic in Reykjavík. After her PhD on the narrative structure of the mediaeval Icelandic sagas, she spent a few years working as a librarian. She has published a number of articles on the sagas and their manuscripts, and consulted on the historical and linguistic details in Christina Courtenay’s viking age ‘Rune series’ of novels.
During the coronavirus lockdown in 2020, Jo used her free time to turn from the mediaeval northwestern boundary of Europe to the modern southeast. Inspired by the film 'And Then We Danced', she taught herself the basics of Georgian using Howard Aronson’s grammar, and with the help of online friends in Tbilisi. She joined Lia Chokhoshvili's remote classes as an intermediate student and now works freelance as a copy-editor, proof-reader, and translator. She does regular work for the academic publisher Brepols, for Cambridge University Press, and The Hut Group.
She is still awaiting the publication of her first translations, but she has been involved in collaborative work including the Oxford Diversity translation project and the Poetry Translation Centre’s workshop on Maia Sarishvili’s poetry. She has translated the short story ‘Cross of Bullets’ by Ninia Sadghobelashvili, is currently working on a biography of the artist Niko Pirosmani, and is involved in the group translation of Aka Morchiladze’s postmodernist novel ‘Santa Esperanza’.
She has a particular interest in contemporary Georgian poetry - in order to better understand its composition, she has even tried writing her own as part of Rebecca Ruth Gould’s classes in ‘transreading’ Georgian poetry at The Poetry School. She has worked with the artist Andro Dadiani on translations of some of his poems, and hopes one day to produce a complete translation of his collection ‘Purgatorio’.
She lives in rural Ulster with two greyhounds, six ferrets, and a very patient husband.
