Born Alan Mark Sheridan-Smith, Sheridan studied English at St Catharine's College, Cambridge before spending 5 years in Paris as English assistant at Lycée Henri IV and Lycée Condorcet.
[1] Returning to London, he briefly worked in publishing before becoming a freelance translator.
He translated works of fiction, history, philosophy, literary criticism, biography and psychoanalysis by Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Robert Pinget and many others.
He was the first to publish a book in English on Foucault's work and also wrote a biography of André Gide.
Sheridan occasionally contributed to the London Review of Books in the 1980s.