Andrew Rickard
I studied French and German at McGill University in Montreal, graduating in 1996 with first-class joint honours and winning the Swiss Ambassador’s Prize for German. Thanks to a scholarship from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, I also spent a semester studying Weimar literature and contemporary philosophy at the University of Regensburg.
After university I ended 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 a hack writer for sixteen 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 I’d rather be a translator; I now spend my free time ferrying dead authors into English and back into print.