Walker Thompson read Russian and German as an undergraduate at Magdalen College, Oxford, from 2014–2018, going on to complete his Master’s in Syriac Studies at Wolfson College in 2019. Since 2019, he has been a junior lecturer at the Slavic Institute of Heidelberg University, where he is pursuing doctoral studies in linguistics. He first became interested in Georgian culture while still in school after attending two events in London: a exhibition by a Georgian photojournalist about the 2008 Russo-Georgian War, and a reading of Dato Magradze’s poetry. Upon finding out that Georgian was offered at the Oxford University Language Center, he jumped on the opportunity to study the language, and has been actively involved in translation projects with Lia since 2016.
He is a contributor to the previous volume of Georgian–English translations, Unlocking the Door (Tbilisi, Cezanne, 2017), as well as to the forthcoming translation of Goderdzi Chokheli’s Human Sadness.
