Jim Naughton was born in 1950 in Edinburgh, Scotland. He studied Czech and Russian at Cambridge University, gaining his doctorate in 1978. Author of Czech and Slovak language textbooks, his literary translations include Miroslav Holub's feuilletons The Jingle-Bell Principle, Bohumil Hrabal's Cutting It Short, The Little Town Where Time Stood Still, and Total Fears, a selection from Letters to Dubenka.
The Festival's honorary translator, Jim Naughton lectures on Czech language and literature at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages in Oxford, where he lives.