Janina Orlov (born 1955 in Helsinki) is an awarded literary translator, working mainly from Russian and Finnish into Swedish, and is an active promoter of Finnish literature. She has done great contributions to the success of Finnish literature abroad, and has received several awards for her translation work. Authors whom she has translated include Sofi Oksanen, Katja Kettu, Rosa Liksom, Hannu Raittila Fyodor Dostojevsky, Nina Sadur, Sergey Sedov and Aleksandr Pushkin.
Janina holds a PhD in Russian and Russian literature from Åbo Akademi University and is a senior lecturer in Children’s Literature at Stockholm University. She has done lectures in several different countries, as well as supervising seminars on translation of Finnish literature in Sweden and Finland, among them a master class in Finnish translation at the Finnish Cultural Institute in Stockholm. She has written numerous articles and reviews on children’s literary history, Swedish and Finnish children’s literature, and Russian literature. Her writing has been published in Åbo Underrättelser, Tidskrift för litteraturvetskap, Horisont, Agora, Ny Tid, HBL, DN, Opsis, Norsk Litterär Årboka, Syd – Österbotten, among others.
From the year 2008 until now Janina has played an important part in literature in Northern Europe. Among other things, she’s been a member of the Adjudication Committee for the Nordic Council Children and Young People’s Literature Prize, board member of the Swedish Writers’ Union, treasurer of the Three Seas Writers and Translators Centre in Rhodes, chairman of the Baltic Writers’ Council, and member of the editorial board of Children’s literature in education UK. She is currently writing a chapter about the first half of the 1800-century in Swedish children’s literature for a forthcoming History of children’s literature in Sweden.