Anne Rosemary Cookes was born in south London on 9 July 1924.
She joined the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry during the Second World War, and taught Morse code at the SOE at Grendon Underwood, Bucks, where she met Povl Born, a Danish air force pilot.
In 1946 they married and moved to Copenhagen, where she studied English literature at the university.
She began writing poetry and, at the same time, began translating Scandinavian writers into English, such as Hans Christian Andersen, Karen Blixen, Jens Christian Grøndahl, Per Petterson, Michael Larsen, Janne Teller, Stig Holmas, Carsten Jensen, Sissel Lie, Henrik Stangerup, and Knud Hjortø.
[2] For her translation of Per Petterson's Ut og stjæle hester as Out Stealing Horses, she won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award.