Daniel Weissbort was born in London in 1935, and educated at St Paul's School and Queens' College, Cambridge, where he was a History Exhibitioner, graduating with a BA in 1956.

[1] In 1965, with Ted Hughes, Weissbort founded the magazine Modern Poetry in Translation (MPT) which he edited for almost 40 years.

In 1965, Ted Hughes founded with Daniel Weissbort the very influential journal of Modern Poetry in Translation which included bringing the work of Czesław Miłosz to the West who would later go on to win the Nobel Prize in literature.

Weissbort and Hughes were instrumental in bringing to the English-speaking world the work of many poets who were hardly known from countries like Poland and Hungary which were controlled by the Soviet Union.

Hughes wrote an introduction to a translation of Vasko Popa: Collected Poems in the Persea Series of Poetry in Translation under Daniel Weissbort, General Editor, which was reviewed with favour by premiere literary critic John Bayley of Oxford University in The New York Review of Books.