Daniel Weissbort was born in London, England on April 30, 1935. He studied history at Queens' College, Cambridge. After briefly working in his father's clothing factory, he took up research work in poetry in post-Stalinist Russia. He was the founder with Ted Hughes of Modern Poetry in Translation (MPT), a magazine that publishes the best of world poetry in translation, in 1965. Weissbort edited MPT until 2004. He worked as a professor of English and comparative literature and leader of a translation workshop at the University of Iowa. He edited numerous anthologies including An Anthology of Contemporary Russian Women Poets and was the author of collections of poetry including Letters to… Ted. He died on November 18, 2013 at the age of 78.