Born in Tulle (France) in 1963. She became a literary translator after studying Russian literature and civilization at the universities of Clermont-Ferrand and Paris (Sorbonne) and at the Moscow Institute of Philology. Today, Catherine Perrel is General Editor of Editions Verdier’s Russian literature collection Slovo.

She was the first to bring the works of Sigizmund Krzizhanovsky to the attention of French readers. She has translated works by Boris Pasternak (La Pléiade, Gallimard), Yevgeny Zamyatin, Alexander Grin (L’Âge d’Homme), Mikhail Tarkovsky (Verdier), and others.

She is the author of adaptations of operas, documentary and fiction films, scenarios (S. Loznitsa, Y. Pasternak, A. Sokurov, A. Tarkovsky, S. Eisenstein, Ya. Protazanov, A. Askoldov, A. Caperna, J. El-Tahri, C. Nemescu, C. Porumboiu). She has translated several works of film and art criticism devoted to Eisenstein, Trauberg, Bergman, Boris Mikhailov, among others, as well as the catalogue of the Kollektsia exhibition. Her work extends beyond the realm of Russian literature, as she has translated poems by Giorgos Seferis with M.-C. Fauvin.

Catherine Perrel also teaches translation at the European Literary Translation Centre. She has organized for the Centre region a series of meetings and conferences on translation, in collaboration with the bookshop Le Livre in Tours.