Anne Born, who has died aged 87, was the author of a dozen local histories of her adoptive home county of Devon; a score of poetry collections and contributions to contemporary anthologies; and some 50 translations of modern Scandinavian novels and poetry collections. She was also a tireless campaigner on behalf of literary translators, working with the Society of Authors (through its translators' association) and serving on the translation advisory panel of Arts Council, England (until its abolition in 2006).
She was an only child, born Anne Cookes in the southern suburbs of London, and was educated at home by a nanny and a governess. Her father, Dudley, ran a shipping insurance company in the City; her mother, Lily, had been his secretary. Anne was much inclined to reading. Her great-great-great-grandfather Sir Thomas Cookes had been the founder of Worcester College, Oxford, and later, in the 1970s, Anne took a BLitt there as a mature student.
The second world war brought a change in her expectations. She joined the Fany, and worked teaching morse code at the SOE station at Grendon Underwood in Buckinghamshire. There she met Povl Born, a young pilot in the Danish air force, but they lost contact as the war progressed. They met again by chance on a London bus and were married in 1946 and moved to Copenhagen.
This was where Anne first attended university, using her rapidly acquired linguistic fluency to study for a postgraduate degree in English literature through Danish. It was also there that the Borns' eldest son, Conrad, was born. Three more children were born when they moved back to Britain, settling in Oxfordshire: Christopher, Caroline and Crispin. According to Caroline: "Anne was absolutely not an earth mother. We always had au pairs, and she taught ESL [English as a Second Language] at St Clare's Hall on Banbury Road. At the same time, she had immense energy, both for us and in keeping the house meticulously clean." She was also quietly acquiring a fluency in reading Norwegian and then Swedish.
Anne began writing for publication in the 1960s. Already a private poet, she also began writing and translating short pieces commercially before finding her feet as one of Britain's foremost translators of Danish, something with which she obtained considerable practical assistance from her husband. This was well ahead of the current boom in "Eurocrime", at a time when literary translation was almost entirely confined to the classics, or at least to "high" literature. Born contributed to both genres, for example in translating Hans Christian Andersen's The Comet (in 1982); in providing the first English rendition of The Snow Queen and Other Poems (in 1977); and in translating the entire oeuvre of Karen Blixen (aka Isak Dinesen), including Letters from Africa, 1914-1931 (1981).
Such authors could, however different to one another, be regarded as literary staples. Jens Christian Grøndahl (Silence in October, 2000; Virginia, 2003; An Altered Light, 2004) and Per Petterson (To Siberia, 1998; In the Wake, 2002; Out Stealing Horses, 2005) are two novelists whose successful introduction to an anglophone readership was due to the persistent dedication of their translator. She and Petterson were rewarded for the latter with the Independent foreign fiction prize in 2006 and the Impac Dublin literary prize in 2007.
Born also took literary chances, on authors with no prizes to their names, even in their homelands, not excluding poets. Most did not make it into print in the UK more than once: a mix of a younger generation of names – such as Michael Larsen, Janne Teller, Stig Holmas and Carsten Jensen – alongside those more established in their countries of origin, including Sissel Lie, Henrik Stangerup and Knud Hjortø.
Born continued writing her own poetry alongside her other literary undertakings. In the 1980s, the Borns moved to a house in Salcombe, Devon, that had been owned by Anne's family since 1938, and there she began writing local history and folklore. In addition to a number of books on south Devon and her Salcombe Shipyards: Poems From the South Hams (1978), she also compiled an anthology of poetry entitled Leaves (1991).
I first met Born through the Translators' Association steering committee in the 1990s. We most recently collaborated when I invited her to speak at a conference on Scandinavian translation at the University of East Anglia. Throughout she was a quiet, but erudite presence, always ready to advise from a position of specialist knowledge.
Povl died in 1999. In 2007 Anne suffered her first stroke and, four months ago, a major one that paralysed her left side. Nonetheless, she was reading her work aloud to the local poetry group In the Company of Poets two days before this stroke, and afterwards insisted on teaching herself to sign greetings cards right-handed.
She is survived by her children, five grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.