Anne Pennington

She went to Simon Langton Girls' Grammar School before joining Lady Margaret Hall where she studied French and Russian and in 1955 she earned a first class degree from the University of Oxford.

[2] In 1980 she became a Professor holding the chair in Slavonic philology[2] that had belonged to Robert Auty[3] and once to her mentor, Boris Unbegaun.

Pennington frequently visited the Balkan Slav states although her studies included Bulgaria, Poland and what was then Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia.

Academically she studied fifteenth century Serbian church singing and discovered the pronunciation norm.

In the review, the Oxford don Bayley wrote that Popa was "one of the best European poets writing today.