April FitzLyon

Born Cecily April Mead, at Langton Herring, Dorset, in 1920, she was educated as a small child in France and later at St Mary's, Calne, in the west of England.

After that, she translated Émile Zola's Au bonheur des dames (Ladies Delight, 1957), the correspondence between Romain Rolland and Richard Strauss, and some recent French novels.

She produced biographies of two Spanish singers, the daughters of Manuel del Pópulo Vicente García: firstly of Pauline García-Viardot, who was a star of nineteenth century France (The Price of Genius, 1964), and later a new life of Pauline Viardot's sister Maria Malibran, one of the most notable opera singers of the century (Maria Malibran: diva of the romantic age, 1987).

[1][2] In 1975 she published Nobody: or, The Disgospel according to Maria Dementnaya, a translation of a Russian samizdat novel, Nikto, which was about the seamy side of the life of Bohemian dissidents and had been smuggled out of Russia in 1966.

For about twenty-five years before her death, April FitzLyon was the General Secretary of the Russian Refugees Aid Society, and she made many broadcasts for BBC Radio.